“I’ll find my way to the chateau alone. Fortunately, I know the way,” she added. “François, you must go with Miss Davis, so as to carry the other suit-cases. Then you’ll come back to Madame as quickly as possible.”
Taking a watch out of her pocket, Nona now glanced at it.
“I am coming with you, Barbara. Already we are nearly an hour behind the time when the field hospital expected to be on its way. If I return now I shall either find that everybody and everything has departed, or else it will merely be an additional trouble to dispose of me at the last. A day’s loss of my services cannot make such a great difference. So we can first find out how greatly the Countess Amélie needs us, and then tomorrow, one or both of us must somehow manage to rejoin the army. The French retreat may not be so universal as we fear.”
By this time the blue front door had been flung open by François, so that outside the girls could hear the tramping of many feet. But the feet were moving with a rhythmical swing that proved the French soldiers were at least retreating in good order. So far there had been no rout by the enemy.
Now François was in the greatest hurry of the three. He had taken Barbara’s bag out of her hand and now laid hold of Nona’s. Then he set off, trotting so rapidly down the path, in spite of his age and crooked legs, that the two girls could scarcely keep up with him. Afterwards he led their way into the woods, skirting along by the edge of the trees and keeping safely out of sight of the soldiers, although numbers of them were marching through the same woods on the farther side.
It was by this time early in the afternoon, but the girls found the chateau undisturbed. Indeed, the autumn sun shone down upon it with the same tranquillity as though the world had been at peace instead of war. Across the neglected lawn a peacock stalked as majestically and disdainfully as if the old gardens had been filled with the belles and beaus in the silks and satins of a more picturesque age.
However, the two American girls were living in a too tragically workaday world. They had no thought and no time for beauty, since a shorter and more compelling word urged them on.
The lower part of the old chateau was deserted, and as neither Nona nor Barbara knew the way upstairs, François preceded them. He opened first the door of the Countess Amélie’s room, but found it empty. Without hesitating, he then turned and walked quickly down a narrow corridor to another room at almost the opposite end of the house. Knocking at this door and receiving no answer, he crept in softly, beckoning to the two girls to follow him.
But this room was so vast that neither Nona nor Barbara immediately discovered its occupant. Evidently it was a man’s room and must have covered the entire southern end of the chateau. Yet it was almost bare of furniture of a conventional kind. On the walls old muskets hung and bayonets of a bygone generation. The floor was of stone, uncarpeted, and there were only two chairs, a tall chest of drawers and a single iron bed in the apartment. If the young Captain Castaigne was a dandy, as Eugenia considered him, certainly there was nothing about his room to suggest it!
But Barbara was first to reach the bed, because she first saw that the Countess Amélie had thrown herself upon it. She may have fainted earlier in the day and thus alarmed François, but at present she showed no signs of serious illness. Her face was drawn with suffering, nevertheless she attempted to rise and speak to her guests as soon as Barbara approached. The Countess Amélie belonged to the ancient aristocracy of France whose women went to the guillotine with smiles upon their faces. It was a part of their pride of class not to betray their deeper emotions.