“Messieurs,” he said to them pitifully, “if you could save my horse—?”
The troopers nodded their heads significantly. One of them, with a good heart, put a flask of brandy to his lips.
“Come,” he said, “you will catch cold here, Monsieur, and your horse is dead.”
CHAPTER XIV
NIGHT
Night fell upon the field of Wörth, upon the bloody scenes and the upturned faces of the dead, and all the horrid sights of woe and desolation! Through the dark places of the hills the French were flying to Saverne; or even southward to the city of Strasburg itself. In the valley, where at dawn the whole glory of the day had shone, the wounded cried for succour and for death. Burning villages, beacon-fires, the lanterns of the human vultures gave light for the hour. A mighty host crossed the mountains, cavalrymen on foot, infantry upon horses, peasants mad with fear—the pursuing Uhlans everywhere.
Beatrix heard the murmur of retreat; she did not quail before it. All her friends were fleeing from the doomed city; but she remained. Down there by the river where the vanquished had fallen, she searched, lantern in hand, for the body of her lover. Never once did she doubt that he was dead. She had watched the glittering horsemen as they rode from the woods; she had seen them fall as corn before the sickle. There could be no hope that Edmond lived, they told her. Above, on the heights, the home which was dear to her sent tongues of flame to illumine the darkness of the woods wherein her love-dream had been given. The Prussians had burned it. She had seen Frenchmen dead in the rooms of her house; she had listened to the fierce shouts of anger and of despair when the Prussians came up through the woods and drove their enemies before them. The stress of battle had closed about her with a mighty roar as of some stupendous storm raging in the hills. Hidden in a dark place, the trembling Guillaumette at her side, she had waited and had watched for help and for the tidings. But old Jules Picard, who had ridden down toward Wörth at sunset, returned no more. The day had willed the death even of this bent old man, she thought.
“They will not harm old Jules Picard, Madame,” he had said. “I shall go to Morsbronn and bring the news. Those fellows do not shoot there any longer. The Captain will come back with me. He is down there somewhere; be sure of it. In one hour, in two, we will return—together. Ma foi, there is little life in this old body. Why should the Prussians want what is left? There will be dead enough to count by-and-by. Run to the woods, my child, and wait for me. It will not be long.”
He went away as though his were the lightest errand in the world; but he did not deceive himself, and he said that Edmond Lefort must lie with those others, the cuirassiers, who nevermore would see the sun or hear a comrade’s voice. His real mission was to go up to the great château on the hill, the home of the Count of Durckheim, and to ask if any shelter were possible there for the girl-wife Lefort had entrusted to his keeping. Well he knew what the roads to Strasburg or to Saverne would be like that night. The maddened, despair-driven, flying hosts; the rolling waggons, the plunging horses; the throngs of fugitives become as devils—what hope for any woman abroad on such a journey? Far better that she should wait in her own woods. The storm would blow over to-morrow. All report said that the Germans knew how to treat the women of France.
In the shadow of the woods Beatrix watched the advancing Prussians as they drove the French from the thickets and came upward, ever upward toward her home. She saw them in the sacred rooms of her own house; she was a witness of the last fierce onslaught when the Turcos fell in heaps before the arbour she had loved and the flames burst from those very windows which had shown her the white villages and the havens of silence. Some terrible judgment of God seemed to have fallen upon her. It was as though a sea of fire surged about her, lapping her with molten ripple, tossing in upon its terrible waves the bloody victims of war and passion. Ever in her ears a voice said: “He is dead; Edmond is dead.” She did not complain; she did not move from her watching place. She thought that surely she must die in the woods; that her eyes must be for ever closed to the terror of those sights and sounds; that in death she would hear her lover’s voice again.