“Well—?”
“Will you believe it? It seems she looked at her watch-bracelet and said: ‘Do you gentlemen dress for dinner? I do—but we’ve still time for a little Moussorgsky’—or whatever wild names they call themselves—‘if you’ll make those people outside hold their tongues.’ Our captain looked at her again, laughed, gave an order that sent the lieutenant right about, and sat down beside her at the piano. Imagine my stupour, dear sir: the drawing-room is directly under this room, and in a moment I heard two voices coming up to me. Well, I won’t conceal from you that his was the finest. But then I always adored a barytone.” She folded her shrivelled hands among their laces. “After that, the Germans were très bien—très bien. They stayed two days, and there was nothing to complain of. Indeed, when the second detachment came, a week later, they never even entered the gates. Orders had been left that they should be quartered elsewhere. Of course we were lucky in happening on a man of the world like Captain Chariot.”
“Yes, very lucky. It’s odd, though, his having a French name.”
“Very. It probably accounts for his breeding,” she answered placidly; and left me marvelling at the happy remoteness of old age.
VI
The next morning early Jean de Réchamp came to my room. I was struck at once by the change in him: he had lost his first glow, and seemed nervous and hesitating. I knew what he had come for: to ask me to postpone our departure for another twenty-four hours. By rights we should have been off that morning; but there had been a sharp brush a few kilometres away, and a couple of poor devils had been brought to the château whom it would have been death to carry farther that day and criminal not to hurry to a base hospital the next morning. “We’ve simply got to stay till to-morrow: you’re in luck,” I said laughing.
He laughed back, but with a frown that made me feel I had been a brute to speak in that way of a respite due to such a cause.
“The men will pull through, you know—trust Mlle. Malo for that!” I said.
His frown did not lift. He went to the window and drummed on the pane.
“Do you see that breach in the wall, down there behind the trees? It’s the only scratch the place has got. And think of Lennont! It’s incredible—simply incredible!”