“Oh,” she said, “one gets into the habit of it here. You are Mr. Watts, are you not?”
He nodded his head.
“Richard Watts, young lady—as much at your service as your French friends will let me be.”
“Do you think we shall have any difficulty in getting into Strasburg, then?”
“No difficulty at all—and God help us when we’re there.”
He smoked contemplatively for a little while, and then continued:
“There is nothing good in France to-day, young lady. I have been fighting all my life, and I know what I say. Your German friends will be at the gates of Strasburg in a week and then the fruit will fall. It rots on the trees already. It has been rotting since the day that knaves began to pluck it. Look at that fellow in the ditch there. Yesterday he was all gold lace and glory. To-day he is dead, and you cannot see the gold lace for mud. The glory has gone up to the hills, where the Prussians burn the farms. You have married a Frenchman, and you do not believe me, as a matter of course. Twenty years ago I thought as you did. It’s a long time, twenty years, Madame—a long time. France was the first nation in Europe twenty years ago. In twenty years hence, she may be so again. These poor fellows could not wait, you see.”
A dead chasseur lay in the ditch at the roadside. His head was pillowed upon his arm as one who slept a child’s sleep; but his splendid uniform had been washed by the mud of the fields, and the pillagers had cut off two of his fingers for the sake of the rings he wore. Beatrix closed her eyes that she might not see the dead man’s face. To what new scenes of peril and of death was that strange journey carrying her? The cities in danger! She could not believe it possible.
“I am going to Strasburg because my husband will come there when they release him. I could not go anywhere else, for I have no other friends in France. If the Germans follow, it will not matter. They are gentlemen, I am sure. Even you admit that?”