I doubt if we would have heard it even then had not Mr. Burton and Hilda come to Paris on their wedding trip. We had a dinner for them at the Café de Paris, and Mr. Burton told us that we were all to have the Croix de Guerre. He insisted on ordering champagne to celebrate, and Aggie had two glasses, and then said the room was going round like the weather vane on the tower at V——.
She then went rather white and said: “The ladder was fastened to it, you know.”
“What ladder?” Tish asked sharply.
“The rope ladder I was standing on. And when the wind blew——”
Well, we gave her another glass of wine, and she told us the tragic story. She had fallen behind me, and was round a corner, when she felt a sneezing spell coming on. So seeing a doorway she slipped in, and she sneezed for about five minutes. When she came out there was nobody in sight, and after wandering round she went back to the doorway and closed the door.
There were stairs behind her, and when the counter attack came she ran up the stairs. She knew then that she was in the church tower, but she didn’t dare to come down. When the firing stopped in the streets a soldier ran down the stairs and almost touched her. A moment later she heard him coming back, so she climbed up ahead and got out on a balcony above the clock. But he started to come out on the balcony, and just as she was prepared to be shot her hand touched a rope ladder and she went up it like a shot.
“It was dark, Tish,” she said with a shudder, “and I couldn’t look down. But when morning came I was up beside the weather vane, and a sniper from our lines must have thought I didn’t belong there, for he fired at me every now and then.”
Well, it seems she hung there all day, and nobody noticed her. Luckily the wind mostly kept her from the German side, and the sentry couldn’t see her from the balcony. Then at last, the next evening, she heard him going down, and she would have made her escape, but he had cut the rope ladder below. She couldn’t imagine why.
Tish looked at me steadily.
“It is very strange,” she said. “But who can account for the instinct of destruction in the Hun mind?”