“In that case, I will!”
Madeleine helped her. But no one, unless it was the French interpreter, realized the pathos of the moment. The limber had been furnished with cushions, a small trunk, and a wooden box of Placide’s. The driver had announced that he was “going by the dirt roads, it’s easier for wimmen.” Then that faded lady kissed the man whom she had married because the Second Empire told her to, and replied to his “Courage, Eugènie,” simply: “I think I shall not catch cold!” and went away in an army limber, with Placide stalking behind.
* * * *
Madeleine watched them go. Alone of all those present she, perhaps, noticed the change which seemed to settle down on the house, almost at once. It was not yet abandoned, but its women, its natural guardians, had gone from it.
The orderly, ration “fag” in mouth, cleared the table with a clatter, spilling grease on the floor. The marble overmantel, between the vases a former D’Archeville had brought from the sack of Pekin, and the Sèvres clock, became, as though by magic, littered with pipes, ashes, revolver ammunition, maps, indelible pencils—all the flotsam of men campaigning far from the decencies of property and housewifery. She tried to get the Baron on one side, having not for a moment forgotten her business at the château, but he was busy giving the Colonel, and a young officer who had come quietly in, as if by chance, some detail of the district. Before she could make her wants known, the Colonel, who had swept back the cloth, silver salts, plates, flower vases, all at one sweep, planted his 1 in 40,000 army map, and had his finger on the square pasture, and centerless E of building labeled “Ferme l’éspagnole”—the Spanish Farm.
“That belongs to mademoiselle,” the interpreter interposed, prompted by the Baron, indicating her.
“Arthur,” said the Colonel to the young officer, “your platoon can make a ‘strong point’ there, where the roads join, and sleep in the house, while it’s worth it!”
In an instant, Madeleine relinquished all thoughts of pursuing her father on the Baron’s bicycle. It was not merely that if she had had to choose between loyalty to her father and loyalty to the home, she would have chosen the latter. It was also that, had her father been there to counsel her, he would certainly have said, “Garde la maison, ma fille!” “Stick to the house, my girl.”
“I’ll go with you,” she told the lieutenant, and went out into the darkness with him.
The horizon, from beyond Ypres, to the northeast, right round to near Béthune to the south, was ablaze. Over captured Merville, Estaires, Armentières, hung floating lights. The bombardment had ceased, the Bosche being too fearful of hitting their own advanced parties. The machine gun clamor was subsiding, both sides no longer knowing in the darkness where their bullets went. The farm Madeleine found already occupied. Tall lean figures, magnified in the candle-light, had stripped lengths of fabric from an aeroplane that had come down in the pasture, and lay half buried, grotesquely mangled, a putrefying mass of charred human flesh, wood and delicate machinery in the middle. They were covering every crevice in the kitchen windows. They made shelters, and gun-pits, and loopholes. By midnight the house was no longer a farm, it was a tactical “strong point.” Madeleine had too much sense to protest, and declined firmly to be evacuated. Calling the officer and sergeant together, she pointed to her door: