She had forgotten it, indeed, and she stood with a rosy flush upon her cheeks and the old straw bonnet swinging by its ribbons in her hand. The excitement of the week had robbed her of any memory of days. She heard the bells of the village churches, and all her English reverence for Sunday came to reproach her. Guillaumette, on her part, did not love the priests. She began to bustle about the kitchen again.
“We shall not go to Wörth to-day,” she said. “We shall go to Mass to see if there are any soldiers there. That is what Sunday is for. There will be cuirassiers upon the road, and the hussars ride by to Bitche. I heard it in the village. If Monsieur comes back to-morrow and brings his friends, it will be the wine for which he will ask. It is always like that. Wine, wine, wine—and when the wine is all gone, bon jour! Oh, I know those fellows—I, Guillaumette. Do not think about them, Madame. They will drink us up—and then—to the wars!”
There was no argument possible with Guillaumette when she had spoken. She was as imperious as a general of armies. Beatrix used to surrender at once, telling herself that Guillaumette was always right. And an idea came to her when she remembered that it was Sunday. She would ride her pony to that glade of the Niederbronn which had been the home of their picnic on the day that Edmond left her. She could not sit in a church, she thought. The deeper gifts of religious consolation were lost in the unrest and doubt of such an hour. The impulse to be doing something was irresistible.
The sun was still shining when old Jacob brought the pony to the door, but scuds of grey and black cloud loomed above the valley, and the breeze had fallen away again until it was scarce a whisper in the trees. She heard the bells of Wörth and of other villages, whose red roofs and white houses dotted the valley below her. But there were no soldiers upon the road, and everywhere it was as though the spirit of the God of peace had come upon the mountains.
CHAPTER VII
“THOSE OTHERS”
She struck the road to the village of Reichshofen, and followed it upward through the forest. There were few abroad upon it, and such as she met were peasants going to Mass. An old woman, red-cheeked and hale, gave her good-day, and added that her son was at Châlons. A group of harvesters played dominoes upon a knoll of grass at the roadside, but stood up awkwardly when she passed. A farmer, driving a weedy brown horse, drew rein as he approached, and asked if there were any soldiers between him and the village. To such as these news of war was little more than news of that distant Paris which interested them so little. The Emperor was going to Berlin! What mattered it to men who were watching the ripening grape or husbanding the maize and the tobacco?
It was dark in many of the thickets, and she rode impetuously, now galloping, now letting the pony go as he would. At the cross-roads, a little way from Reichshofen, she heard a clatter of hoofs behind her and turned her head to see a little old man on a great grey horse, whose outspread cloak and upturned elbows gave him the appearance of a flying mill. She recognised him as the kinsman of the Count of Durckheim, whose château lay beyond Froeschweiler, and she saw that he wished to speak to her. There was no greater gossip in the mountains. He would have the last news from Strasburg, she was sure.
“Good-day, Madame; did you think that I was a Prussian? You ride like a hussar! I have seen your pony’s heels ever since you passed the white mill. And to church, too!”