CHAPTER XI
THE HUSSARS ARE AT GUNSTETT
It fell wet upon the morrow, a heavy soaking rain, which quenched the watchfires and wet the shivering troopers to their very skins. All day long, weary infantrymen and gunners sleeping upon their guns came listlessly down the valley road; even the woodland heights were solitudes no more. Beatrix, worn with anxiety and waiting, saw the dark faces of the Algerians as they lurked about the garden gate and bandied words with the sentry who had been posted there. She beheld the aides-de-camp dashing wildly down toward the hollow or away to Reichshofen or Bitche. The ground trembled as the rolling guns were dragged upward to the heights. The horsemen, splashed from head to foot with mud, went by doggedly to their camp in the valley. A great sound, rising and falling, as the murmur of an angry sea, was heard all day, even in the thickets of the heights. The drenching rain could not check the sound, nor any door shut it out. The very air quivered with the echoes of turmoil and of movement. Men turned from camp to camp as though no place of rest was anywhere to be found. Peasants fled to remote glades of the mountains, with children clinging to their knees; women wept for the homes which would be homes to them no more.
It was nearly dark when Edmond returned to the châlet. The rain had soaked through his cloak, and his weary horse could scarce stand upon its legs. He met his child-wife at the gate and led her quickly to the house. She saw that the day had changed him strangely. He was thinking of something else even while he greeted her.
“The Colonel will not come,” he said. “He has gone to join de Failly. I am left at Wörth with a squadron. We have ridden all day on a reconnaissance towards Seltz, but there are no Germans there. God knows, I wish you were not here, mignonne—I blame myself, but how can you go now? There is not a road which is free—not any one to whom I can trust you. The troops come in every hour and the battle is for Sunday. My God—if it should be here!”
He stood for a moment holding both her hands and looking with earnest eyes upon her laughing face. The scarlet plumes drooped, wet and sodden, over the dulled brass of his czapska. The silver epaulettes were tarnished; there was mud even upon his tunic; but, more than all, his sunken cheeks and weary step spoke eloquently of his fatigue. A great pity for him came upon her, and she drew him into the brightly lighted room, and would not hear of his apprehensions.
“Dearest,” she said, “of course I shall not go away. As if it mattered. And Guillaumette is here. She has been giving wine to the troopers all day. When her Gaspard goes to Berlin he is to bring her a mug. There will be nothing to drink in Wörth by that time. We shall have to go to Paris or die of thirst. As if it were not enough to have you home again.”
She was talking and laughing all the time, and with deft fingers helping him to change his sodden clothes. She did not ask him if the news of yesterday were true, for she feared his answer to her question. Every effort of hers was one to remind him that he had come home again. The bright lights in her drawing-room, the fire Guillaumette quickly kindled there, the little dinner they had thought so much about, the hundred gestures of affection and of love compelled him to forget the grim scenes without. He shut them from his memory for a short hour, and thought only of the childish face lifted to his, of the days of happiness which the mountains had given to him.
“It is good to have you to myself, mignonne,” he said when dinner was done and she had rolled his cigarette, and lay curled up on the rug at his feet. “I feared that Tripard would come, and the others, but they are gone by to Bitche. Michel has all the cavalry he wants for anything we are likely to do here. There are the two cuirassier regiments under Bonnemain, and Septueil has the light brigade. You remember Septueil at Strasburg—the man who always told you that you were a Prussian at heart and would never marry a French soldier. He rode in to-day, and Duhesme is with him. I am sorry for the people down below—there are no more vineyards now, and you could not find an empty house in the villages if you offered ten thousand francs for it. I met old Mère Bartres as I was coming up. The Turcos have turned her out of the cottage with the little ones—she was going to sleep in the woods, but I sent her to the stables. We must do what we can for all these poor people now. If the worst comes to the worst and we are beaten—”
She laughed at him, and put her arms about his knees.