“They are Prussians, Madame Lefort—Uhlans from across the Rhine. Look at them well. We shall see many in France before the year is out!”
He pointed dramatically with his finger as two horsemen rode suddenly into view; their presence was a vindication of his words. Beatrix had met few German soldiers before that day; and now when she saw these two Uhlans, who reined back their horses as much from curiosity as from prudence, she did not believe for a moment that they were not Frenchmen. Certainly their tunics of light blue, with the scarlet cuffs and shoulder-straps, and the eagles upon their helmets, were strange to her. It would be some regiment she had not met with either in Strasburg or in Paris, she thought.
The Uhlans halted before the glade, but when they saw a harmless old man with a young girl at his side sheltering from the rain, broad smiles covered their faces, and they beckoned to others behind them. There were fifteen in all, Beatrix counted, sturdy fellows, splashed from head to foot with the mud, sunburnt, bearded, yet well horsed and full of ready activity. One who seemed to be a captain, and who spoke French with a guttural accent, bowed low to her and asked the way to an inn.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “si fou foulez m’indiquer une auberge par ici.”
She knew not why it was, but a strange sense of fear and foreboding came to her when she heard the man speak. She did not realise that troopers out of Baden, for such they were, had ridden into France; but a vague consciousness of danger environing her was not to be avoided. Nevertheless, she would have answered the question if old Picard had not been before her.
“Herr Captain,” he said, “there is an inn five miles from here. You turn to the right.”
The Uhlan shrugged his shoulders.
“Which means to the left,” he said; “and then, mon ancien!”
Picard shut his snuff-box with a snap.
“And then—you can go to the devil.”