It was a time of day to call back the past, for in the falling dusk modern things and old things blended lovingly together. For all one could see of detail, nothing had changed much since the plain of Picardy was the great Merovingian centre of France, the gateway through which the English marched, and went away never to return until they came as friends. Still less had the scene changed since the brave days when Marguerite de Valois rode through Picardy with her band of lovely ladies and gallant gentlemen. It was summer when she travelled; but on just such an evening of blue twilight and silver moonshine might she have had her pretended carriage accident at Catelet, as an excuse to disappoint the Bishop of Cambrai, and meet the man best loved of all her lovers, Duc Henri de Guise. It was just then he had got the wound which gave him his scar and his nickname of "Le Balafré"; and she would have been all the more anxious not to miss her hero.
I thought of that adventure, because of the picture Brian painted of the Queen on her journey, the only one of his which has been hung in the Academy, you know, Padre; and I sat for Marguerite. Not that I'm her type at all, judging from portraits! However, I fancied myself intensely in the finished picture, and used to hope I should be recognized when I strolled into the Academy. But I never was.
Looking down over the plain of Picardy, I pretended to myself that I could see the Queen's procession: Marguerite (looking as much as possible like me!) in her gold and crystal coach, lined with rose-coloured Spanish velvet, jewel-broidered: the gentlemen outriders trying to stare through the thick panes obscured with designs and mottoes concerning the sun and its influence upon human fate; the high-born girls chattering to each other from their embroidered Spanish saddles, as they rode on white palfreys, trailing after the glittering coach; and the dust rising like smoke from wheels of jolting chariots which held the elder women of the Court.
Oh, those were great days, the days of Henry of Navarre and his naughty wife! But, after all, there wasn't as much chivalry and real romance in Picardy then, or in the time of St. Quentin himself, as war has brought back to it now. No deeds we can find in history equal the deeds of to-day!
We got lost going home, somehow taking the wrong road, straying into a wood, plunging and bumping down and down over fearful roads, and landing—by what might have been a bad accident—in a deep ravine almost too strange to be true.
Even our French officer couldn't make out what had happened to us, or whither we'd wandered, until we'd stopped, and our blaze of acetylene had lighted up a series of fantastic caverns in the rock (caverns improved up to date by German cement) and in front of that honeycombed gray wall a flat, grassy lawn that was a graveyard.
"Mon Dieu, c'est le Ravin de Bitry!" he cried. "Let us get out of it! I would never have brought you here of my own free will."
"But why—why?" I insisted. "It isn't the only graveyard we have seen, alas! and there are only French names on the little crosses."
"I know," he said. "After we chased the Germans out of this hole, we lived here ourselves, in their caves—and died here, as you see, Mademoiselle. But the place is haunted, and not by spirits of the dead—worse! Put on your hats again, Messieurs! The dead will forgive you. And, ladies, wrap veils over your faces. If it were not so late, you would already know why. But the noise of our autos, and the lights may stir up those ghosts!"