She buried her face in her hands and would let her eyes follow the horsemen no more. Old Picard, on his part, did not try to help her. The spectacle was as wine to him. Blood coursed through the blue veins of his cheeks and forehead. He gripped the reins until his nails cut the flesh. He did not know that the rain fell upon his face or that the sun had ceased to shine. The story that he tried to tell her was almost incoherent.
“The hussars from Bitche—eh, Madame? Do you not see that they give them their breakfast? They were in the house then—they were at the farm. Ma foi, what a meeting, what a dish! Keep close to me, child. Do not look at them. They are the hussars from Bitche. The splendid fellows!”
He drove his horse before her and began to breathe quickly as a hunted animal. One of the Uhlans had ridden through the gates of the farm and a French hussar was at his heels. No race at Longchamps or Chantilly was like that race for life up the road of the pass. Old Picard saw that the pursued was the officer who had spoken to him at the glade. He did not bear him any grudge, yet wished to see him die. It was as though the troops of France had sounded the horn and started a fox from the thicket. The game must be killed; that was all. And the hussars would kill it. He read their ferocity in their faces. The hunted man was their prey. They were as beasts hungering for blood. All that they had learned in barracks and upon the field schooled them to this lust of blood. The very excitement of it sent them rolling in their saddles; the intoxication of it was almost delirium. “En avant, en avant!” The cry was hardly human. It was the scream of men who hasten to see another die.
“Fired wildly on the stooping figure before him.”
Twenty paces from the tree whereunder Beatrix stood, the end came. One of the Frenchmen, seeing that the Uhlan’s horse outpaced his own, drew a revolver and fired wildly at the stooping figure before him. There was no sign upon the instant that the bullet had hit its mark; but, when the doomed man had come up almost to the tree, he raised himself in his saddle and threw his arms above his head. Beatrix saw his face; a smile seemed to play upon it. For a moment the smile hovered there; then, suddenly, a white shadow crept up from chin to forehead, the eyes set to a wild stare, blood gushed from the mouth; the German fell headlong from his horse and lay dead at her feet.
“La France, la France!”
Twenty voices took up the cry in frenzied triumph. Other horses galloped by upon the road to Wörth. The Uhlan lay, face downward, in the mud. Old Picard, hat in hand, paid his tribute to the dead. Beatrix heard him speak to her, but his voice seemed an echo of a voice far off.
“My child,” he said, “the sun does not shine upon us any more. Let us go home.”
His words awakened her as from a horrid sleep. The rain fell in torrents on the open road of the pass. She shuddered to her very heart, but it was not from the cold.