“Oh, the fine gowns, the silver and the gold, Madame! They will not harm us. The brutes—to dance such things in the mud. Are you not going to speak to them, to ask about Monsieur? Look at the splendid fellow in the yellow silk. He would be a Würtemberger! All the Würtembergers are animals—shall I go and ask him, Madame?”
Beatrix ran on appalled. This carnival of ribaldry seemed as some picture from the nether world. That men should sing and dance, with the dying and the dead for their audience, was an infamy passing belief. Henceforth she avoided the beacon fires as she would have avoided the lamps of hell itself. The forest became a place of terror. She scarcely breathed until she had left it, and stood in the fields with the lamps of Wörth twinkling below, and the heaven of stars looking down upon the faces of those who cried to heaven for sleep and death.
“We shall find Monsieur now, Guillaumette,” she said simply; “he will be waiting for us. Afterwards we will come to these poor people. If one only had the power to help them—the balm which would give them sleep! Is it not strange that we can walk here at all? Yesterday, when the dead man was in our stables, we dared not pass the door. To-night the dead are everywhere! There is no pity left in the world. Even the children are forgotten.”
She spoke as one uttering thoughts which no other shared; but Guillaumette admitted none of her philosophy.
“The Virgin be praised that I have no children this night!” she exclaimed. “And do not think that we shall find Monsieur here. He has gone to Strasburg with the others. Ask Monsieur the Curé, and he will tell you so. There would be shelter for you in the house of the curé, Madame. They do not eat the priests, those animals—and we are hungry, oh, so hungry!”
They stood above the high-road to Strasburg at the moment and could see the patrols upon it, the glistening bayonets and the unresting Uhlans. Lights were moving in all the neighbouring villages. Watch-fires flamed upon the hills; the bugles blared incessantly. Everywhere the German cordon of possession was being drawn tight. Beatrix, in spite of herself, found her awe of this mighty, invincible host rapidly becoming a subtle fascination. Pity for France was there; but it gave place to an overmastering realisation of victory unrelenting, to a surpassing sympathy with the dying who heard no word of grace, with the wounded whose wounds were still unbound—with those alone and friendless in the terrible night. The army, the glorious army of yesterday—it was a rabble now, fleeing through the mountains impotently. That which amounted almost to contempt for its impotence was among her thoughts. It had left the bones of France to the enemy—it had left those children of France dying there in the darkness of the hills. For her it was a glorious army no more. Edmond alone remained to her. She saw that she would not eat nor sleep until she held his hand again.
“Guillaumette,” she said, “go to the curé and tell him that I am here. If he will help me—”
“But you will be alone, Madame.”
“I shall be with Monsieur.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders.