The Garden of Swords

by Max Pemberton

“And no one has been to the house?”

“Henri came at twelve o’clock to say that you were to go to the General’s house. He thinks about you always, Madame. There is no one else.”

Beatrix entered the dreary dining-room with a sigh. Great beams buttressed the ceiling of it; the windows were heavily boarded up so that little rays of light, stealing in through many a chink, showed lustrous dust as a room long barred to the sun. Everywhere about the chamber were those necessaries of the daily life which spoke eloquently of the dead. An open book with a note upon the margin in old Hélène’s handwriting—a list of the ambulances with names of the poorer sufferers; a half-written letter, a ball of wool, the last copy of the Courrier du Bas-Rhin. Above the mantelshelf there was a large oil painting of Marie Douay, old Hélène’s child. Her mother’s was a plaintive, wayward face, Beatrix thought as she gazed upon it. Her father had loved that face, but the mind behind it had never been linked to his. His English prejudices had wrecked his life. Racial antipathy, forgotten in the hour of passion, had revived in the sombre atmosphere of domestic monotony. Beatrix remembered that she, too, had married one who looked with contempt upon the England she loved. She asked herself if, when these dreadful days were forgotten and peace should build her a house again, the story of the father must be told again by the child. It was but the reflection of a moment, a passing thought born in that gloomy room. She put it away from her resolutely, and, crossing the darkened chamber, she knelt before Edmond’s portrait and kissed it passionately. The barrier which her own forebodings had put between them was broken now that another shared her secret. She desired her husband’s return ardently. She had nothing to conceal from him. If only her friend were saved, she thought that she could remember this war as some chastening epoch of her life, which had permitted her to look into the book of her affections and to read there, without fear, of that which was written—if only her friend were saved.

It was her secret no more, and yet it pursued her relentlessly, even there at the Place Kleber. Alone in the silent room she almost counted the seconds as the pendulum in the old clock numbered them. Every sound in the street was the omen of message for her. She could find no employment to which she might put her hand. The open piano mocked her as she listened to the rolling music of the shells and the shivering chords of the great guns’ victories. When she looked out from the staircase window of the house the same melancholy scene ever rewarded her eyes. Whole acres, which were streets and churches and markets a month ago, were now but rubble for the builder’s cart. She could see the wind-tossed flames rising up above the ruined north; her imagination depicted for her a people living below the earth for fear of the death which was everywhere above them. Hunger, want, poverty, terror, anger—the whole gamut of the passions might be struck in such an hour. And yet Strasburg did not yield. Black and bloody, mourning its dead every day, shaken to its very foundations, threatening soon to become the dust of that earth from which it had arisen—the heart of the city remained its own. “Until the last stone,” the Governor had said. That day could not be distant, Beatrix thought.

Richard Watts had promised to bring her news of Brandon at six o’clock, but the bells struck the hour, and again the half-hour, and there was no message from him. For a long while she waited, the victim of doubt intolerable, and of a presentiment she could not seek to justify. As the minutes passed, her conviction became more sure. The old Bohemian had failed her, she said. He had gone to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel to find that Brandon was no longer there—perhaps even to learn of his death. The man Gatelet was not one to forgive. There was no reason why he should not have betrayed her friend. She hoped for no clemency for him. At seven o’clock she told herself that Brandon certainly was dead, and that Watts feared to come with an admission of his failure. She could endure the doubt no longer, but putting on her hat, and caring nothing for the heavy rain which hissed upon the burning city, she ran to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel, and did not pause until she stood at the tavern door.

There were few in the street, for the storm had driven even the troops to shelter. In the tavern itself the bright light shone upon many faces—the faces of men weary with service at the guns; the faces of countrymen sodden with wine and wet; the faces of traitors declaiming in drunken frenzy against those who did not drive the Germans from the gates. A few women, whose coarse finery was as some dissolute echo of the forgotten day of peace, laughed in discordant keys, or gave the notes of ribald songs. Everywhere the enormity of the night appeared to have driven such as ventured from their homes to riot and debauchery. Men struck each other in the tavern and were applauded by their comrades. A loutish gunner, whom wine had robbed of his wits, was thrown into the gutter, and lay there with the rain beating upon his face. Mob orators stood upon stools and prated of the glories of the siege. A fiddler struck up the notes of the “Mourir pour la Patrie,” while a hussy bawled incessantly, “Vive l’armée—l’armée!” Presently the “Marseillaise” was sung by many throats hoarse and discordant. A man threw a wine flask through one of the glass windows. The café would have been wrecked but for the appeals of an old soldier, who had lost an arm at Wörth, and whose voice spoke as eloquently as his wound.

Such was the scene upon the ground floor of the auberge—a scene in striking contrast to the dark and gloomy windows above. There was no light in any bedroom of the house, nor any sign of life there. Beatrix even could take heart when she beheld the unlighted windows of the garret wherein Brandon had been a prisoner. After all, Richard Watts had good news for her. She did not doubt that he had contrived her friend’s escape. Possibly Brandon was at that moment a prisoner in his house, with old Anne Brown for his jailor, and an English home for his cell. She took great courage of the conviction, and was about to return to the Place Kleber, full of the expectancy of good tidings, when a window in the house by which she stood was opened suddenly, and the head of a soldier peered out into the night. Instinctively she crouched back against the shutters of the shop; and so standing she observed the man; while he, in turn, gazed steadfastly at the unlighted windows opposite, and then answered a question asked by someone invisible in the room behind him.

“The Englishman has left, François?”