CHAPTER XXIII
THE NIGHT OF TRUCE
Hélène of Strasburg was dead, the Mother of the City, the queenly woman who had helped the city so often to courage and self-sacrifice. Though Strasburg suffered then, though her people lived no longer in the light of day but burrowed to the cellars and the vaults where no Prussian shells could harm them, they came forth as a great army of the children of night into the sunshine which hovered about the open grave. For they had loved the mistress of the house of Görsdorf, and to many of them she was as one of their own, ever to be held in the high place of memory where all that has made for the sweetness and the truth of life should be stored up.
Hélène was dead. The news went quickly as tidings of the ultimate misfortune. The soldiers on the ramparts heard it, and told each other that the day of the cataclysm was at hand. The brave men of the city took a new resolution of endurance. “We shall avenge the shell that struck down her house,” they said. In the churches the priests spoke of Christian love and of the divine truth that in motherhood all love is born. When the body was at length carried forth and the drums rolled and the bells tolled, it was as though the whole city came out for that cortége. Even the children cast flowers upon the path. The Governor himself, the dauntless Uhrich whose name was honoured then almost above any name in France, was first at the graveside and last to leave the stricken house when the people had gone to the darkness again.
“You must not stay here an hour, my child,” he said to Beatrix; “my house is open to you; you must be my guest. I am afraid that it is only the beginning. Their guns are reaching this quarter every day, and it is not safe even in your cellars. Besides, you are alone—”
She thanked him, but would not go.
“Hélène would have wished it,” she said. “I cannot leave her work to others. If she had lived, we should have stayed here until the end. And Edmond will expect to find me here when he returns. I could not play a coward’s part, General.”
Her resolution pleased him. Day by day it was his duty to teach the men of Strasburg the meaning of their debt to France. Here was a little English girl who needed no lesson.
“Ah,” he said, “if the others would talk like that! I shall tell your story at the Council to-day. Madame Lefort remains in the Place Kleber! They will be ashamed, my child, and you—you will not do anything foolish. I will send some men up to make your house safe. After all, we are becoming night birds now. And there is no Madame Hélène to tell us our duty. I am grateful to you for doing wrong, Madame, but if you wish it—”
“Hélène would have wished it,” she repeated; “how could I meet my husband when he comes back if I were faithless to her memory? And I shall be less alone here, General, than in another house. If it is possible for the dead to counsel us, Hélène will help me still. I seem to hear her voice always in my sleep. I know that she hears me when I speak to her!”