“If we are beaten, dear—ah! if the mountains fly. Who is coming to Wörth when the army is here, and you are here, and—I am here! The ride has tired you. I know what it is—oh, so well—to be tired with all the world, and to think that everything is against you, and that to-morrow will be the deluge. But when to-morrow comes you get up early, and the sun shines, and you forget what it was all about, and there is no deluge. I used to be like that often when I was at the convent in Strasburg. The bells were an enemy; I hated the old man who sat at the gate; but when the gate opened and old Hélène was there, and I went to the Place Kleber and saw you upon your horse, and all the lances of the regiment, and heard the music everywhere—I was glad that there had been those other days. If the sun shone every day, there would be no summer. And our summer is to come. It will not matter when or where—but we shall tell each other about to-night, and that will make the sun shine for us.”
She talked bravely, but her words were vain. That spirit of hope which had animated him yesterday was his friend no more. He was telling himself, though he whispered no word of it to her, that Douay had been defeated at Weissenburg, and that his division fled, panic-stricken, through the hills. The same army which had defeated Douay might be at the gates of Wörth to-morrow. What answer would MacMahon give to it—ah, what?
“I do not fear for the men,” he said, when she had rolled him another cigarette, and he had listened a moment to the thunder of that mighty human avalanche in the valley below; “it is those who lead. Why do we want biscuit even here on our side of the frontier? Why are the magazines at Strasburg empty? Why does no one know anything of the Emperor’s plans? They tell us that Douay was surprised, yet whose fault was that? There are no finer fellows than the troops down yonder in all the world. If they are beaten, then God help France and us!”
She refused to respond to his earnestness, and still wished to lead him to other thoughts.
“Oh! We are in the convent to-night,” she exclaimed impulsively, “the bell will ring presently, and grandmère Hélène will come. To-morrow there will be the feast, and I shall see the lances go by and hear the music. And Edmond will be there—he will have forgotten the deluge.”
The note of it was jest, but she changed it on an impulse and spoke of her own great love for him.
“We have always ourselves, dearest,” she said; “nothing can change us. There will always be our home—and our love.”
There would always be her love! Ay, indeed, as he looked down upon the little face, and the watching eyes, and the pitiful mouth, down at the long hair falling upon his knees, and the white hands of the child-wife that destiny had sent to him, he said that love should ever be his recompense. And he slept with his arms about her and forgot that the enemies of France were upon the fields of France, and that to-morrow the dead would be numbered and many a home would mourn a son, and many a wife would listen for a voice she nevermore would hear.
At dawn a trooper, riding madly up from the camp, awoke him with an urgent message.