“No, no?” shrieked Aimée. “No, I beg of you, Baron—I beg of you to spare our home. Remember your word to us!” cried the girl frantically in German.
But he only laughed triumphantly in her face, and the man he addressed as Ernst, having left to do his bidding, he with the other officer and two grey-coated orderlies, gleefully commenced to wreck the splendid room, while the two terrified women, clinging to each other, stood in a corner watching how they vented their mad ire upon all on which they could lay their hands.
In a few moments they were slashing the upholstery with their swords, tearing down and destroying the ancient Flemish tapestries, while the Baron himself paid particular attention to the pictures—all valuable old masters—defacing and destroying them one by one.
“See, woman! what we will now do with this snug home of yours?” he said in his drunken frenzy as, taking up an iron poker from the big open grate, he attacked the beautiful old chandelier of Venetian glass suspended in the centre of the room, smashing it to fragments.
The yells of the men in the adjoining apartments mingled with the smashing of furniture and loud, drunken laughter, reached them where they stood. They told their own tale. Everywhere in that splendid old château destruction was being carried on at the express orders of the cultured Baron von Meyeren, one of Germany’s noblemen.
“Wreck the place?” he yelled to half a dozen burly Uhlans who burst in, two of them holding bottles in their hands. “And we will make a bonfire afterwards. This woman has cursed us, and we, as German soldiers, will teach her a lesson she will not easily forget!”
Poor Mélanie had disappeared, but above the terrible disorder and wild shouting were the shrieks of the female servants below, while a smell of fire suddenly greeted their nostrils.
“Look, mother! there’s smoke!” gasped Aimée in terror. “They have set the château on fire?”
As she spoke, two of the Uhlans had torn down a huge picture—part of an altar-piece from a church at Antwerp—which occupied the whole of the end wall of the room, and were kicking their big boots through the priceless canvas. It was a picture attributed to Rubens.
“Come, child, let us go,” whispered the Baroness, her eyes dimmed with tears, and her face pale and set.