The travelers alighted, Henriette among the first, alarmed by the glare they had beheld from the windows of the cars as they rushed onward across the darkling fields. The soldiers of a Prussian detachment, moreover, that had been sent to occupy the station, went through the train and compelled the passengers to leave it, while two of their number, stationed on the platform, shouted in guttural French:
“Paris is burning. All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning, Paris is burning!”
Henriette experienced a terrible shock. Mon Dieu! was she too late, then? Receiving no reply from Maurice to her two last letters, the alarming news from Paris had filled her with such mortal terror that she determined to leave Remilly and come and try to find her brother in the great city. For months past her life at Uncle Fouchard’s had been a melancholy one; the troops occupying the village and the surrounding country had become harsher and more exacting as the resistance of Paris was protracted, and now that peace was declared and the regiments were stringing along the roads, one by one, on their way home to Germany, the country and the cities through which they passed were taxed to their utmost to feed the hungry soldiers. The morning when she arose at daybreak to go and take the train at Sedan, looking out into the courtyard of the farmhouse she had seen a body of cavalry who had slept there all night, scattered promiscuously on the bare ground, wrapped in their long cloaks. They were so numerous that the earth was hidden by them. Then, at the shrill summons of a trumpet call, all had risen to their feet, silent, draped in the folds of those long mantles, and in such serried, close array that she involuntarily thought of the graves of a battlefield opening and giving up their dead at the call of the last trump. And here again at Saint-Denis she encountered the Prussians, and it was from Prussian lips that came that cry which caused her such distress:
“All out here! this train goes no further. Paris is burning!”
Henriette, her little satchel in her hand, rushed distractedly up to the men in quest of information. There had been heavy fighting in Paris for the last two days, they told her, the railway had been destroyed, the Germans were watching the course of events. But she insisted on pursuing her journey at every risk, and catching sight upon the platform of the officer in command of the detachment detailed to guard the station, she hurried up to him.
“Sir, I am terribly distressed about my brother, and am trying to get to him. I entreat you, furnish me with the means to reach Paris.” The light from a gas jet fell full on the captain’s face she stopped in surprise. “What, Otto, is it you! Oh, mon Dieu, be good to me, since chance has once more brought us together!”
It was Otto Gunther, the cousin, as stiff and ceremonious as ever, tight-buttoned in his Guard’s uniform, the picture of a narrow-minded martinet. At first he failed to recognize the little, thin, insignificant-looking woman, with the handsome light hair and the pale, gentle face; it was only by the brave, honest look that filled her eyes that he finally remembered her. His only answer was a slight shrug of the shoulders.
“You know I have a brother in the army,” Henriette eagerly went on. “He is in Paris; I fear he has allowed himself to become mixed up with this horrible conflict. O Otto, I beseech you, assist me to continue my journey.”
At last he condescended to speak. “But I can do nothing to help you; really I cannot. There have been no trains running since yesterday; I believe the rails have been torn up over by the ramparts somewhere. And I have neither a horse and carriage nor a man to guide you at my disposal.”
She looked him in the face with a low, stifled murmur of pain and sorrow to behold him thus obdurate. “Oh, you will do nothing to aid me. My God, to whom then can I turn!”