The Garden of Swords

by Max Pemberton

“There is no light there, M’sieur.”

“Of course, there would be no light. We shall catch the pair of them. Why does not he come? It was for eight o’clock.”

“Well, they are ready in the café. Shall I send for Benoît, M’sieur?”

He did not wait for the response, but shut the window with a crash. To Beatrix the few words were as a sentence of doom pronounced against her friends. Richard Watts had failed, then. He and Brandon were over there in the garret together. The house was watched. Those who watched it were waiting for some signal to begin their work. She imagined readily that Gatelet was the one who delayed. She remembered that he had spoken of the need of his presence at the citadel. They must have detained him there, she thought. It was an intolerable, enduring agony to stand out there in the wet and the cold, and to tell herself that the last two friends she possessed in Strasburg might die when a few minutes had passed. What to do she knew not. Her first impulse was to enter the house by the side door and to confess all she had heard and seen. But when she emerged from the shadows and crossed the street, she found a sentry pacing the alley, and his bayonet was fixed upon his rifle. She saw the man without surprise, for she expected to find him there. But the reality of his presence was as some final crushing blow. She did not move from the place where first she had perceived him. The vision of that scene in the café before the Minster doors came to her with a vividness as of the moment of its happening. Brandon was to die, then, as that other had died. This was the end of their folly.

The sentry paced the alley with slow steps. Sometimes he would lean wearily against the door of the house; at other times he went a little way out into the street to look up at the unlighted windows above. He did not see that the girl watched him, for she stood at the corner of the street, and he had eyes only for the tavern. Once, indeed, an exclamation escaped his lips, and he crossed the alley and remained for quite a long time gazing up at the attics. A light, appearing suddenly in Brandon’s room, warned him to the action. Beatrix saw the light, too, and the shadows it cast upon the blind. They were the shadows of Brandon and of Richard Watts. She had no longer a doubt. Her friends were in the house. She was impotent to help them. A cry of hers would bring the drunkards from the café leaping as devils to the work. She could but stand and wait—God knew for what horror of that September night.

The light remained in the window, it may have been for twenty minutes; but the shadows of the men vanished instantly. It seemed to Beatrix that hours of suspense passed before there was any new movement in the street; yet she knew that she had waited there but a little time, for she heard the church clock strike nine, and she could see that the candle in the room above had burned down but a little way in its stick. As the moments passed and the suspense became almost insupportable, she began to pace the street again; telling herself that now the end was coming; or listening for footsteps upon the pavement; or seeking to read some message of hope upon the golden blind. Always with her was the sure and torturing knowledge that she could do nothing for those who had done so much for her. In all Strasburg there was no friend who would help those friends of hers. The very blinding rain which still fell upon her burning face was as some truth of the pitiless night. Brandon must die—there in the garret. She did not ask herself why the peril in which this man stood could move her to such agonies of distress. He was to die. She had seen another die at the Minster doors, and he had been a stranger. But this man was her friend, almost her brother—one of her own race. In that moment she knew that her heart lay wholly in the England she had left, and that never again would a sentiment born of passion mislead her to a hope in France and a desire for kinship with its people.

As ten o’clock was struck by all the bells of Strasburg, a man riding a black horse came down the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel at a canter. She recognised him as Gatelet, and she saw him enter the house where the watchers were concealed. Anon, three men came out of the house together and crossed over to the tavern. She knew why they had gone, and she stood as a figure of stone while their loud talking was heard even in the street. Presently a roar of voices answered their appeal. Troopers in a frenzy of drunken passion came running out of the house to cry that there was a spy in the garret above. A woman, with a besom dipped in resin for a torch, began to sing the “Marseillaise.” Others who had not been in the tavern were drawn from the neighbouring houses to make a great press now swarming before the doors of the auberge. A young officer of artillery climbed a pillar and cried incessantly “À la lanterne.” Others demanded that the tavern should be fired. Inside the house itself a terrible uproar was to be heard. Men fought upon the narrow stairs as dogs for a bone. Windows were opened in the street, and new cries for tidings swelled the clamour. Mounted troopers rode up to the alley and besought those inside to throw the spy down to them. In the garret itself there were many lights, and many figures upon the blind until a strong hand tore it down and an elbow shivered the glass behind it. The very pit of hell seemed opened there. The mob swayed to and fro, delirious with anger and the desire of death.

Beatrix had been caught up in the press, and was thrust forward toward that door which she had passed with such hesitation but a few days ago. The roar of the multitude was as the song of the sea in her ears. She saw a vision of devilish faces upturned; of savage men brandishing knives and swords and any weapons that came to their hand; of a window bright with many lights, and of figures moving there. She heard men say that the German was taken; terrible sounds of glass-breaking and of the oaths of the frenzied troopers rent her ears as the voices of tempest. She tried to utter an appeal for mercy, but no words left her lips. Her friend was dead, she thought. He had paid with his life for their jest upon the field of Wörth.