An RGL First Edition, 2025
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
An RGL First Edition, 2025
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
Adventure, May 1916, with "The Signal Fire"
We give you a war story only when it's so good we simply can't pass it up. This is a tale of France, of a maid who would sacrifice all for her country, and of a young aviator who gives you some thrills you'll not soon forget. A romance of exceptional strength and feeling—intense, dramatic, with vivid pictures of real war.
A GROUND mist hung over the valley of the Marne that morning in September, blurring the outline of trees and low rolling hills. Off to the east the sky showed plainly the promise of the coming day in ribbons of light, which pierced the mist and set it a-tremble, breaking it here and there as an army wavers and recoils before attack, ere it rolls back in a general retirement.
Above the misty sea, in a rapidly rising crescendo, came a low steady humming, which grew and grew to a roar. A great thing of cloth and metal ribs, supporting its wide-flung wings between which its hollow body pitched forward behind the blur of its well-nigh invisible propeller, swept suddenly into sight, headed west by south like a great homing pigeon, toward Paris or perhaps merely the lines of the French.
Two men rode upon it, so swathed in leather, so hooded and goggled that one could distinguish naught of their nationality or personal appearance. Yet one versed in military affairs, particularly aeronautics, would have judged the machine as a scout of the allied forces.
Had there remained any doubt in one's mind, the rapid sequence of events, following the appearance of the great mechanical bird, would have set them at rest.
Through a lane of the wavering mist, a stretch of the valley appeared. As if the sunbeam had been a great sword, the shrouding haze rolled back, cut in twain.
Beneath the darting monoplane appeared men and horses—a troop of horsemen riding slowly forward. And they were looking upward, attracted by the drone of the swift scout of the air. They sighted it on the exact instant the mist cloud parted. Their leader whipped out a heavy German automatic and, flinging his hand upward, discharged a shot in the air. Behind him his men unslung their carbines and began firing as fast as they could pump in the shells.
Pop-pop-pop-pop! The sound of their firing drifted up to the men who rode the plane.
He at the controls acted quickly, sliding his levers. The monoplane banked sharply and sped off at an angle, banked again and shot back in a zigzag course. He said sharply to his companion—
"What are they—make out?"
"Ain't uhlans!" the other returned, shouting back above the roar of the motor. "Near as I could see, they got on funny-lookin' fur caps with something white on their fronts. Look like a crack troop, sir, to me."
"The devil!" exclaimed the pilot. He banked again sharply and began to turn back. "I want to make sure of that. Take the glasses and get 'em when I go over. If the Death-Head Hussars are down there it's important. See if your white spot isn't something like a skull and cross-bones."
The mist had drawn still farther back as the plane swung around. The cavalry contingent beneath it was fully revealed, and they were watching the scout ship's evolutions. As it turned, several men dismounted and knelt down, aiming their weapons upward at it from a knee rest, but reserving their fire for its nearer approach.
Like the dart of a dragon-fly, it stabbed in toward them in a clean straight rush, held so, until its driver caught a sibilant, "Skull and cross-bones it is, sir," from behind him, then swerved and shot suddenly off and up at a long-leaping slant.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop The men crouched down there were firing now.
Rip! A bullet tore through a vane. Ping! One plunged at the body of the machine. The man who had been using the glasses dropped them and caught up a light rifle. Whang! His shot cracked back and downward at the rapidly dwindling horses and men.
Thud! A sound, soft, deadened, muffled, like slapping a quarter of beef with a wet cloth.
The marksman on the plane dropped his rifled It whirled downward. He sagged forward, his head and shoulders over the edge of the car's pit. The machine lurched. He slid farther over, then entirely free. His body went twisting and spinning down toward the last vanishing wisps of the fog.
"God!" said the pilot to the empty air.
Up, up swam the plane and turned. On an even keel it darted back. The lone man in its pit fumbled a bit with something. Directly above the horsemen, his hand swung over the side. A small object hurtled earthward and exploded in a cloud of smoke to one side of the hostile troop.
"Missed 'em of course," said the pilot to himself. "Chance work from a plane—all of it. Poor old Sidney! They must have got him clean through, the way he bowled over. The Death Heads are the Prince's own. Something's in the wind, I fancy. I'll get back and report on this."
He headed the monoplane once more upon her course.
THE mist had rolled quite away now, and the
whole valley lay spread out in a fleeting panorama, as
he fled away on his errand. The Marne sparkled far away
between its trees. Below him the trees themselves were but
foreshortened patches of green. The yellow checkers of
fields of stubble from whence grain had been garnered, lay
flung wide across the landscape.
Here and there a cluster of houses marked a village. From a chimney, a curl of smoke wavering upward showed signs of life. It was all peaceful, quiet, under the long rays of the sun slanting across it. From a farmhouse, a few pigeons darted up toward the strange man-made rival of their prowess, and hung in a fluttering cluster beneath it as it throbbed over.
The driver shook his visored head. Looking down, one would never have thought that an army had fallen back across this country the night before, that a second in pursuit of the first would soon march across it, perhaps lay it waste, destroy its peaceful industry and life, even as one of its soldiers had destroyed the life of the other man who had ridden on the plane. Some such thought concerning the tragedy of the nations, had inspired the motion of the pilot's leather helmet.
It seemed a great pity that this region below there, caught in the backwaters of peace, should be so soon fated to be disturbed. In fact it was puzzling to know why the retreating army had apparently passed it by. One had to believe their line of retirement must have passed it on either side and closed in behind it farther to the west.
Suddenly he stiffened, leaned forward in an attitude of strained attention. The even drum of his engine had varied. His trained ear told him it was "missing."
He began a rapid manipulation of the spark and feed controls. Abruptly the motor missed again. His eyes darted to the gage from the fuel-tank and widened briefly back of his goggles. The register was nearly down to zero.
"That bullet!" he gritted in comprehension. "I knew it hit metal. It must have struck the tank pretty well down and most of the petrol's run out. Lord!"
His gaze swept the country before him in a hasty consideration. Without fuel he could do but one thing, and that was to come to the ground in the best place he could find. Ahead, not so far away, in reach by a long volplane, in fact, a cluster of turrets and roofs swept toward him. There were trees about it and outlying groups of other smaller houses. Walls of cut stone joined tower to tower and united them into a whole.
The sunlight threw the whole place into a vivid relief of light and shadow, gilding the turrets and etching their still darkened sides and the shadows of the trees in purple-black lines and splotches. He noted a good-sized level space near one of the walls, not so far from a wide-open gate, nodded in instant acceptance of a suitable landing-place, and shut off the now sputtering motor.
With its drone of power deadened, the plane tilted gently and swept down in a long graceful swoop toward the selected point by the wall. It grounded lightly, slid forward on its rubber-shod wheels and stopped. The pilot climbed down, pushed back his helmet and removed his goggles. He looked around.
Standing there with his visor back, one saw that his-hair was closely trimmed and brown, that his features were a long oval, straight-nosed, between blue-gray eyes, wrinkled the least bit at their outer angles, and reasonably high malar eminences, which fell away into flat cheeks and a well-set square chin. Even in its heavy aviation clothing, his figure gave the impression of resilient strength and endurance throughout its five-feet-eight of length.
He turned his eyes off to the north and east and Rheims, from which direction he had come, and let them lie on the low hills rolling up from the river bottom, swept them slowly around to the south and west and the farther hills over there, brought them back to his immediate surroundings.
He stood in an utter quiet. His appearance seemed to have passed unnoticed. The old château beside which he had alighted lay in absolute quiet. Aside from the coo of a pigeon somewhere on a roof, it might have been some fabled castle of enchantment, for any sign of life. He glanced once at the monoplane with almost an air of regret, shrugged in a final acceptance of the situation, and turned toward the gate in the wall with a quick stride.
And then, as suddenly as he had started toward it, he paused. His hand went to his head in an instinctive attempt at salutation and checked to fall back, when he found his head bare. For one pregnant moment he stood staring at a figure which had just emerged from the very gate toward which he was heading.
Always afterward he was to remember that his first impression had been of black and white and crimson, before he took more particular notice of the woman, who paused at his attempt to uncover and stood as if waiting for him to speak.
Her hair was very, very black—blue-black—and his keen eyes noted that one could see the little threads of it along her brow, sprouting by individual roots from a scalp as white and pure and clean as a virgin page of parchment. And her eyes, too, seemed black,-or very dark at least. Her flesh was white, with a warm blood tint beneath its clear skin, and her lips—ah, there was the crimson!—the crimson of the heart in a rose, warm, soft, a vivid line of color in the whiteness of her skin. And she was clothed in black, a simple gown which the faint air of morning pressed gently against a slender, supple figure and line of limb, from the sleeves of which two white forearms and hands protruded.
"Good morning, mademoiselle," stammered the man of the air-ship in halting French, but with true preception of her youth and the wide eyes of its unsophistication. "Are you the châteleine of the château upon which I have been compelled to trespass?"
The crimson of her mouth retracted, showing a line of white teeth in a slight smile.
"Yes, monsieur, if by that you mean do I live here. It is my home. I saw you come down a moment ago and determined it best to come out and discover the reason."
The man nodded.
"Permit me to introduce myself," he returned. "Lieutenant Maurice Fitzmaurice, of the British aviation corps, on scouting duty."
The woman's smile grew more friendly.
"I, monsieur, am Jacqueline Chinault, of Château Chinault, come to offer you the hospitality of my home, in that case. Also, if you prefer, we may converse in English."
"Right-o," said Fitzmaurice. "I'm a dub at French and know it. You're awfully good to offer me hospitality and all that, but if it were a few liters of petrol, I could do with it a lot better. Still, if you could let me have a horse, or anything on which to get along—"
The smile faded from the girl's face at his words and she became serious at once. Her eyes darted to the monoplane, resting near the wall.
"But your machine—"
"Hole in the fuel tank," the lieutenant explained. "Flew over a German cavalry troop. They shot my mechanic and put a ball into the tank. The essence ran out and the motor ran down. Beastly business. I've got to get back to our lines, too, as fast as I can."
"Back to our lines?" said Mile. Chinault tensely, growing a trifle more white than before.
Fitzmaurice nodded.
"Didn't you know? Jove, they must have passed you on either side! And—" he paused aghast. "Good Lord, Miss Chinault, your place is right between the two armies? You must get out. This is no place for a girl like you. You won't think of remaining? You ought to have gone before this. Why have you stayed on, when we were being pushed back right along?"
She was frowning slightly. One would have said she was considering some point wholly apart from his words from her expression, even though she presently made answer:
"There were several reasons for that. My father is Major Chinault. He is with the Twenty-Third Chasseurs-à-pied."
"Up on the north end," said Fitzmaurice, naming the regiment's station.
"So? I have had no word in days," she accepted. "Most of the younger men on our property left at the time of the mobilization. My father's sister and I remained here to see to the harvesting of our crops as, you may remember, was suggested at the beginning of this war. Then my aunt took ill—is still bedfast, and—" she paused also and faced him directly—"mon Dieu, monsieur, who would have really expected our lines to be over there?" She waved a dramatic hand to the south and west. "Your message for them is important?"
"Judge for yourself," said Fitzmaurice. "Ten kilometers back, about, I passed a troop of the Death-Head Hussars, coming this way."
Jacqueline Chinault pressed her lips together until they became a red line merely.
"So close," she said. "Monsieur, can you fix your tank? If so I can furnish you perhaps ten liters of petrol."
"Why—" Fitzmaurice's jaw dropped, then closed with a snap. "I don't know. Haven't looked. But—good Lord, girl, why didn't you say so before!"
Turning, he ran back to the aeroplane, to begin a hasty examination of the damage done by the German bullet.
Jacqueline followed more slowly, eying the monster air-craft with interest, as she approached Fitzmaurice, now poking about the empty tank with a view to seeing what could be done in the way of hasty repairs. The little frown still lingered between her eyes, slightly puckering their lids. Once she turned her head and looked off toward the eastern line of hills.
Fitzmaurice turned to her as she came up to the machine.
"All I need is a cork to plug the hole and some tape to strap it in. I have the tape. If you could get me a cork—say so big—" he held up a thumb—"I can fix it in ten minutes."
She nodded.
"I will get it, and arrange for a servant to bring out the petrol. Wait."
She turned away and went at something approaching a free-limbed run, toward the gate, to disappear inside.
"Gad!" muttered Fitzmaurice, looking after. "There's a girl for you, now. Never feazed her when I mentioned her position and the Hussars. Cool as you please. Class to her, in every word and action—and line. I picked the right spot to come down in, all right, it appears. Lucky!"
He fumbled in his pocket, produced tobacco and papers, constructed and lighted a cigarette and gazed off to the northeastern sky-line while he smoked, leaning back against the body of the plane. After a long time he spoke, muttering to himself again—
"Beautiful you know—ripping. No business here though."
HE THREW away the cigarette and straightened. The
object of his thoughts was returning promptly. She hurried
to him, her face slightly flushed from her haste, and
extended her hand, with several corks on its palm.
"I—brought all I could find in a hurry," she declared. "Pierre Giroux and his grandson are getting the petrol."
Fitzmaurice bent to select a cork. He noted the hand which held them was trembling slightly; that her breast was rising and falling deeply beneath the tissue of the black gown. At another time he would have taken time to speak to her further, but time pressed if he was to get on his way.
He took one of the corks without a word and turned quickly to climb up and fit it into the hole in the tank, driving it in firmly with a wrench, before he began pressing bits of yellow soap from his kit-box carefully around its edges. Taking a roll of electrician's tape, he began next, winding it carefully over the cork and the soap and around and around the tank itself, to bind all securely in place.
"There!" he exclaimed at the end. "If only France could plug up the German advance as neatly!"
While he worked, the girl had stood by in an equal silence, but now she took up the word.
"France," she cried softly. "France will, monsieur. France must." Abruptly her red lips quivered. "Oh, my France!" She caught herself sharply. "You are ready for the petrol, monsieur?"
Fitzmaurice smiled in satisfaction.
"All ready, mademoiselle."
"It comes then."
Fitzmaurice turned his head. An old man and a boy were approaching. One carried a large can, the other a funnel. The one was bent and grizzled, with the wrinkled peasant features of a painting of type. The other was young, slender, bare-footed, with a face childishly alert.
"Pierre Giroux," said Jacqueline Chinault at his elbow. "His son, young Pierre, has gone with the army. Little Jean there is his child—an orphan. Both helped harvest the crops with the women."
The boy and the man came forward. Fitzmaurice took the funnel and set it in place, lifted the can and poured the precious fuel into the plugged tank, screwed the cover fast and set the empty can back on the ground.
"I sha'n't try to thank you for all this," he said, turning back to Mile. Chinault. "I think maybe the best thing I can say to you is just: It is for France." He leaned over and tested his spark, nodded, straightened and began drawing his helmet into place. "But before I go—just a word about you. You have some way of leaving here, I suppose, and if you'll take my advice, you'll do it without delay. Those chaps back there won't take very long to push forward, and they shouldn't find you here. I don't believe they're guilty of half the things put on them, but just the same there are rotters in every army, and there's no use of your taking chances."
"My aunt is really too ill to be moved," said the girl. Fitzmaurice noticed that her lips were again pressing themselves tight as he spoke in advice. "I have heard they do not act badly to those who offer no resistance. Here we could offer none if we desired. There' are only peasant women and some old men and boys."
Fitzmaurice climbed to his seat. He shook his head. An immense dissatisfaction filled him at leaving this woman here, practically alone and unprotected.
"Still—I wouldn't chance it—really," he advised once more. "You're—pardon me, it sounds bald I know—but you're too beautiful a girl to take such a chance. If you have petrol, you must have a car or something of the sort. Surely your aunt could be taken out in that, under the conditions."
Jacqueline Chinault smiled rather oddly he thought.
"Oh, yes—yes—we have a motor," she said with some hesitation.
Pierre Giroux threw up his hands.
"But, mademoiselle—the petrol!" he cried.
"Pierre!" The girl's tone snapped sharp in command.
Fitzmaurice turned his eyes from her face to that of the old peasant.
"What about the petrol, Pierre?" he demanded.
It appeared there was something here he did not understand, but which was plain to the man and the girl, and which the latter did not intend to have discussed.
The old man fidgeted with downcast eyes. It was the lad who spoke.
"It's in there." He pointed toward the fuel tank. "We took it out of the motor—all of it, monsieur."
Comprehension of that queer smile and all it involved came to Fitzmaurice in a flash. This then was the reason for her reticence in discussing her own situation. She had made a choice, perhaps vital to herself and her welfare, without a word or a sign, The thing gripped him in irresistible fashion, even while he made a choice of his own.
He turned his eyes back to her face. There was something like accusation in their glance.
"You gave it to me—all of it," he said hoarsely. "You were going to let me go away, and stay here with no means of escape to face whatever might come. Well, you won't. We'll drain it out again and I'll take the motor and yourself and your aunt, and we'll get away in that."
He made as if to climb down from the plane.
Jacqueline flushed before the glowing challenge of his glance. The color stained her white flesh briefly, but as he moved, she went suddenly pale. Her eyes flashed back into his. Her lips opened.
"Wait!" she cried, in hurried protest. "I did nothing for you. As you yourself said, it was for France. Keep it. Use it for France. The motor would break down inside the first kilometer quite likely. What then? It is but an old thing left here weeks ago because it was not good enough for military service. Your mission is urgent, and what you propose would mean more delay. There has been enough of that. It is well over an hour since you came down. I made up my mind before I spoke of the petrol in the first place. France needed it. I am a daughter of France. I gave it to her. Your message is of far more importance to France than my danger, and you are neglecting your duty to her. Go, monsieur Fitzmaurice. I—I command it."
"And leave you here—! Unprotected? Good Lord! I can't do a thing like that, you know. Look here. They shot my mechanician. Get in here and let me take you to a place of safety." Fitzmaurice was thinking swiftly.
The girl was breathing quickly.
"And leave my father's sister—ill—alone?" she flung out. "Monsieur is wrong if he thinks me a coward."
Inwardly Fitzmaurice groaned as he met her flashing eyes and watched the panting of her breathing.
"Monsieur thinks you beautiful and overly brave," he said shortly. "Really, Mile. Chinault, you don't fully realize—"
"Look!" cried Pierre Giroux, breaking suddenly in as he lifted a hand and pointed north and east.
A horseman showed on the skyline. He wore a strange bushy cap as he sat his horse and examined the country below and beneath him. In dark silhouette, the two by the monoplane saw him lean forward in the saddle staring toward them, straighten and wave an arm to the rear.
"Good Lord! A hussar!" said Fitzmaurice tensely. "One of those I passed, most likely. Mademoiselle, for God's sake get in here and go with me! They won't injure your aunt. They don't bother the sick."
She shook her head. He saw she was very pale, however.
"I am a soldier's daughter, lieutenant. I—I am not afraid."
"If I stay, I could do you no good—maybe I would do you harm, being what I am," said Fitzmaurice in sick defeat before her determination.
She smiled the least bit in the world.
"Go then, monsieur. Already I have said it."
Fitzmaurice's face was a queer sallow, as he snapped his goggles into place.
"If they don't stop here, I'll—I'll try and come back, to see that you're all right," he suggested. "Can your man there spin my propeller and put me up?"
Pop! The sound cracked out sharply on the morning. A bullet droned past and struck the wall beyond them in a little puff of powdered stone.
Fitzmaurice turned his head in the direction of the shot. More horsemen had appeared. They were racing their horses down the slope of the hills, firing as they came. Pop-pop-pop! their shots rang out.
The aviator turned back.
"Go inside—do anything they say—give them anything they want," he directed his companion. "If they ask about me, tell them I came down to fix something about my engine, and made your man help me. Pierre," he ordered the cringing peasant, now panic-stricken by the shots and the plunging of bullets. "Grab that thing in front there and twist it around!"
The girl herself leaped forward.
"Never mind, Pierre." She brushed him aside. "Set your spark, monsieur. I have seen it done. Are you ready?"
Fitzmaurice nodded. It had all come to seem something in a dream—the sound of the shots, the little spurts of dust kicked up by the bullets, the old man and the boy, and the girl he had never seen till an hour ago, flaming there now at the nose of the great gnome engine, her white hands gripping the blades of the propeller, her red lips parted, her eyes wide, dilated into pools of dark excitement.
He set up his spark and opened the throttle. He saw the grip of the girl's hands tighten on the ash blades. He saw her lips come together over her breath, saw her bust rise, saw her set herself for the effort. Then every muscle in her splendid supple body seemed to contract. She racked the propeller once, twice, thrice, stiffened in a final exertion of all her strength and spun it around.
Br-r-r-r—! The engine caught on. Jacqueline sprang back out of danger. The monoplane trundled forward, tilted, rose faster and faster—a great thing climbing a long hill of air.
Pop-pop-pop! The shots of the racing horsemen snapped and crackled, seeking to wound it, reach its metal vitals and bring it back to ground.
Still it mounted, circled. From its side Fitzmaurice waved a hand.
Pop-pop! The horsemen were very close now to the château. On the open space by the wall, Jacqueline Chinault gave them little attention. With a hand pressed to her breast, she was watching the dwindling flight of the plane.
"For France," she repeated softly.
Pierre Giroux plucked at her sleeve.
"Mademoiselle, let us get inside."
She turned and walked to the gate and through it. Her eyes swept the space within its walls. It was her home, had always been her home. What would they do to it—those men riding toward it—to it and her. She heaved a great sigh and clenched her hands at her sides.
"For France," she whispered again to herself.
From somewhere beyond the horizon, came a low, growling rumble, like the sound of distant thunder, rolling, dull, heavy, full of menace, under the cloudless sky.
"THE gate! Mademoiselle—I shall close it?" said Pierre in his aged quaver.
"But certainly not. What good could it possibly accomplish? Don't be foolish, Pierre." She brought herself back from her thoughts to answer his suggestion.
"We could fail to respond to a summons," insinuated the ancient. "Perhaps le bon Dieu would make them think the château deserted and so cause them to ride on."
Jacqueline shook her head.
"Not they. They saw us no doubt. Besides they would investigate none the less. They leave nothing to chance or uninspected behind them. They are thorough. Would we were more so."
"They arrive!" shouted Jean from the gate where he had lingered. He scampered toward his grandfather and his mistress, his small face divided between fear and excitement. "They arrive," he panted. "They have fur hats with a skull upon them. There are a million of them—maybe more!"
A voice spoke gruffly without the gate. Followed the sound of stamping hoofs and a rattle of metal. The head of a single horse appeared under the arch of the portal, and was followed by another. Two men rode in on fretting mounts, whose steel shoes rang on the stone flags of the court as they entered. The one in advance was large, florid, tanned to a brick red against which his military mustache showed almost yellow. Behind him his companion sat his horse with the stock of a carbine against his thigh, his fingers gripping it at the breech, ready for instant use.
The two rode forward without haste or pause, toward the woman and the trembling old man and the boy. Not until they confronted one another directly, did they make sign or pause; then the leader drew his mount to a halt and swung it to one side.
"What place is this?" he demanded in heavy French, without any other salutation.
"The Château Chinault," Jacqueline told him.
"So. In your charge or another's?"
"In mine, as it happens."
"Then, in the name of my commander, I demand its surrender by you to me, Captain Steinwald."
Jacqueline's smile held a touch of sarcasm as she made answer:
"The demand will be complied with, my Captain. The garrison finds itself unable to resist." Her hand indicated Pierre and little Jean.
"So. That is well then." Apparently the captain missed entirely her verbal shaft. "We will require food and fodder for the horses and whatever else may occur as the need arises. You will furnish it upon demand without question, to avoid anything unpleasant. What is the matter with that?" he demanded, pointing to the still trembling Pierre.
"I have a notion that he is frightened," said Jacqueline Chinault. "You have a brusk way about you, Captain, and there have been stories—oh, such stories! He is but a peasant. Can one blame him for hearing the stories?"
"Huh!" Steinwald grunted, twitching his yellow mustache. He swung to the man behind him. "We stop here, you. Tell the troop to dismount and remain at ease, then return."
The trooper saluted, wheeled with a flapping of his black dolman and cantered back through the gate. More jingling of accouterments came from beyond the wall.
The captain dismounted and turned on Pierre.
"Take my horse, thou," he directed. "See to it that he is fed and groomed. See that fodder is furnished for the horses of the troop. And try no tricks. If so much as a hair is out of place on my charger—there are bullets in our guns to match the stories. So then begone."
The trooper clattered back, saluting. Steinwald gave a fresh order.
"Go with this old rascal who will show you where to get fodder. Direct the men to feed. We wait until the rest of the squadron comes up. That is all." He swung back to the girl at his side. "But there is a matter to discuss with you, young woman. I should prefer to do it over some of the really decent wine you people make."
Jacqueline bowed. Pierre had gone with the captain's horse and the trooper. She turned to lead the officer up a low line of steps to a door giving upon the courtyard, and through that into a hall. He followed, with a clank of heavy boots on the stone, as different from the lightness of her own free-limbed step, as their two races were from each other.
Presently she turned into a large room, raftered and wainscoted from ceiling to floor in age-darkened oak, against which hung long tapestry panels and some paintings in oil. In the center of the floor stood a great table also of oak, in the midst of a tapestry rug. Jacqueline advanced to the end of this, facing a huge fireplace in one end of the room, and set her foot over a concealed signal button, close to one leg.
Meanwhile Steinwald had thrown himself into a large chair, which he drew up to the table, casting his busby and gauntlets upon the bare top.
The door at the farther end of the room opened and a middle-aged woman appeared and stood waiting.
"I rang for you Marthe," said her mistress. "The officer desires a glass of wine."
Steinwald turned his close-cropped head in the servant's direction.
"A bottle of wine, woman," he amended.
"A bottle of wine, Marthe," her mistress directed, and sat down opposite the captain. "I think you said you had something to speak about to me?"
"Yes." The captain was lighting a cigar. Now he tossed the match on the floor and leaned back at his ease. "As we arrived, an aeroplane left here and flew south and west."
"Certainly," said Mile. Chinault. "What of it?"
"That is what I would know," grunted the captain. "What of it? Who was it? Where was he going? This morning we fired at an aeroplane and a man fell out. But he was dead. He could tell nothing. This looked like the same machine."
"It was," Jacqueline replied. "But I don't know where he was going. He came down here to fix something about his engine. He mentioned your firing upon him. I never saw him before."
"But—you helped him to get away. We saw you. Those who help the enemies of the Emperor court trouble and reprisal, young woman."
"He was a soldier of my people," said Jacqueline simply, yet with a strange little pulse beginning to beat low down in the white of her throat. "Your Emperor is not mine."
"Not yet," the captain retorted. "Well, what else did he say, besides that we hit him?"
"He told me to offer no resistance to any demands you might make."
For the first time the captain seemed to feel amusement. He smiled slightly.
"So? It would appear that your people are learning discretion then, Mademoiselle. They begin to feel how useless it is to resist us. It is to be hoped it may continue. It will save us some annoyance and so much of suffering to them. But—why have you stayed here—a pretty girl like you?" His small eyes stared into her face.
Jacqueline shrugged, and diverted her gaze.
"It is my home. I am a soldier's daughter."
"So?" Steinwald opened his eyes, and dropped his chin to go on staring.
"Yes. My father is Major Chinault. Some of your people met him in Belgium."
Steinwald chuckled.
"In Belgium is he not now," he declared with heavy humor. "Rather should you have said that he met some of my people. But no matter. Do what the air-man said—be a good little girl, and there will be no trouble. We do not wish to damage this section of the country greatly. It is good grape lands. We intend to grow them extensively here, when peace again comes."
"You have a far vision," murmured the girl as he paused.
Steinwald nodded.
"Yes—we look ahead. There is more to our marching song 'Deutschland über alles' than sound. All has been planned by those above us. Belgium already we have. Soon will it be so with France. It is as good as finished. Then shall we punish those others to the east. Ah, here is the wine!"
Marthe came in with a tray, two glasses and a bottle. Steinwald rose heavily to his feet and inspected the latter.
"You have loosened the cork," he said scowling. "Bring another. Or no—wait."
He seized a glass and poured it full of the liquid.
"Drink," he commanded, holding it forth to Jacqueline across the table.
She took it bowing, but with a spark beginning to glow deep in her eyes.
"You are gallant," she made comment, and forced a smile.
"I am cautious," Steinwald grunted and returned to his chair.
Jacqueline's red lips parted.
"And you suspect poison? Captain, have you worn the death head so long on your busby that you fear some one will seek to place poison within you? I believe there is a connection with the symbol."
Steinwald shrugged.
"It is the symbol of death to those who oppose it. Drink," he said gruffly.
"Do you intend to deny your thirst until you see how it affects me?" the girl ran on, in the grip of a whimsical mood which delighted in flaunting the boorish trooper. "Captain you must have wonderful control. Let me send for another bottle."
Steinwald leaned forward.
"Ach! Then you are afraid," he rumbled. "Drink. It is an order."
"I obey it." Her lips curled. "Behold, Captain. To valor!"
She raised the glass and drank.
THE Captain drew his watch. Jacqueline set her
glass back on the table. The German puffed at his cigar.
Five minutes passed in silence.
"I do not feel at all strange," said Mile. Chinault at the end of that time. "Do you suppose it is failing to work?" There was a quiver of something like contempt in her tones.
Steinwald shook his head shortly.
"Too soon," he declared. "It must absorb somewhat from the stomach."
He sat on. At length he snapped his watch.
"So. It is now ten minutes. It is then nothing, but always is it best to be safe."
He took up the bottle, filled a glass and drank it off, filled it again, and poured its contents down his throat, refilled it and drained half of the third portion; set it down.
"Good wine, very good wine. After the war this country should yield excellent grapes. It is receiving so much good manuring. Ach, yes! After the war, we shall make even better champagne than this."
Jacqueline pressed her lips together. That last thrust from this man who tested his drinks on a woman's body, was almost more than her spirit could endure. She found her eyes damp with tears, half of rage, half of sorrow. She knew how richly the soil had been fertilized with the blood and bodies of her country's bravest manhood. She clenched her hands and sprang up, every nerve a-quiver.
"Never!" she cried. "Mon Dieu, never! Not while a son of France can hold a rifle. The end is not so near as you fancy, Captain Steinwald. It is not so nearly finished as you think. Just because those above you say it must be, is no sign that it will come to pass. While a good God rules, France shall not be blotted out by all your men and cannon. You have wounded France, but you haven't reached her heart. It still beats as it always has beat. I, a woman of France tell you. You had best be as cautious with wounded France, as you were with France's wine just now. You will raise grapes in the Champagne Country, only when France is dead."
Steinwald sat silent before the flaming woman, and the storm of patriotic fury he had aroused. His small eyes blinked slowly. His chin still rested on the collar of his tunic.
But by degrees his face began to flush darkly. He began to sense that she was speaking treason at least to his ears—to question the final triumph of his ruler and arms. He began to rumble deeply in his heavy throat, like a beast growling. His hand tightened on the arm of his chair.
"Stop!" he thundered of a sudden. "To speak so is forbidden."
He half rose and paused abruptly as the sound of heavy footsteps came from the hall.
A rap fell on the door of the room. To Jacqueline it seemed that the one seeking admission must have struck the panels with the hilt of a saber, so sharp was the sound.
Steinwald crossed to the door and wrenched it open to display a soldier standing stiffly with his hand in salute at his busby, his heels together, his figure utterly rigid.
"Herr," the man parroted stiffly, "the Herr Lieutenant bids me inform you that we have discovered a bucket and funnel at the spot from which the aeroplane rose as we approached. Both smell strongly of petrol."
Jacqueline understood. In a sick wave of comprehension she remembered that she had forgotten all about the bucket and funnel when Fitzmaurice had made his escape, and left them where he had set them after pouring the petrol into the tank. And they had been found there!
Her story about fixing the engine was disproven. What would they do? She waited, with a strange, breathless feeling seeming to creep up and chain her in a sort of dreadful fascination. She heard Steinwald's voice.
"So!" He turned back upon her. His yellow mustache rose in a snarling grimace. "You lied then to me, young woman. You furnished petrol to that airman. Do not deny it. To do so is useless."
Some of the heat of her recent defiance still clung to her, despite this sudden discovery of the assistance rendered by her to Fitzmaurice.
"What of it?" she said shortly.
"He was an enemy," said Steinwald. "You gave him help. That is forbidden—to help an enemy of ours."
"He was not an enemy of mine. He was a friend of my people," she retorted. "You had not yet occupied the château."
"He was our quarry," growled Steinwald. "We had shot him down."
He swung back to the stolid trooper still standing in his flat-handed salute.
"Go. Say to the Herr Lieutenant, that I commend his attention. Say that I direct' him to at once place under arrest the old man and the boy who went with Corporal Weiss to get fodder. Direct him to send men to the cottages below here and inform the people of the arrest, and command them to refrain from all hostile acts, on pain of reprisal and the instant death of the man and the boy, and the burning of this château."
The soldier's hand fell. He turned away. His black dolman swung behind him. Steinwald approached the table to pick up his gauntlets and busby. He eyed the girl who stood now pale and silent, shaken and dismayed somewhat by what she had heard.
"As for you," he resumed, "get you above stairs and remain there unless sent for. While you and yours offer quiet submission you will not be injured. In the hall shall a sentry be posted. See that his coming finds you not here."
He strode clanking to the door and vanished, leaving her suddenly alone.
Jacqueline sighed. Her hands fell limply to her sides. She stood with bowed head in the grip of reaction from the events through which she had passed. Something like unreasoning horror seized her for the moment. This was war—to be over run, commanded, threatened, driven about—the whole tenor of one's life set aside, her liberty curtailed, her people arrested and held hostage for her good behavior. She shivered. Again the low rumble as of far-off thunder rolled slowly through the room—guns—cannon!
She lifted her head sharply. Far away as it seemed through the heavy walls of the house, another sound had drifted to her—the fanfare of a bugle. Again she shivered from an inward cold.
She heard the door to the courtyard thrown open. Steps came toward the room where she was standing. A second trooper appeared at the door. Without the least expression on his heavy face, he waved her out in a wide-armed gesture.
"Above stairs," he said in German. "It is ordered." And he stood, waiting.
She might not resist. The young Englishman who had wanted to help her had told her not to think of any such course. Throwing up her head proudly, she walked past the stolid sentry in his dark dress and black cape and busby, where gleamed the symbol of death itself.
He turned and followed to take post just inside the courtyard door, and throw his short cavalry weapon to-port across his chest as he took his position. Save for his words of command he gave her no further attention.
She began the ascent of the stairs. Despite the fact that but for the crowding events of the morning she should long since have paid her daily devoirs to her father's sister, she went slowly. She felt wholly tired. The weight of her limbs, as she lifted one after another, became a conscious effort unlike her normal elastic gait. The clog of defeat dragged at her heels numbing heart and body. That bugle was a German trumpet crying the advance of her country's foes—the march of the invader across the bleeding body of France. Ah, France!
Abruptly her lips quivered and her breath caught in a dry sob. She pressed a hand to her heart as she reached the top of the stairs.
There was a room in the eastern end of the château, up there, where the first sun-ray of morning must always herald the newborn day. It was one set apart years ago for Madame St. Die, when that little lady, newly widowed, had come to care for her brother's orphaned child. Always Jacqueline thought of it as a room both of atmospheric and spiritual brightness, where she had been tended through childhood and youth to the door of mature life where she now stood. She made her way to it and tapped gently for admittance.
"Come in, child, come in," cried her aunt's voice.
JACQUELINE entered. The dark bright eyes of a
little woman with graying hair and a high-nosed, patrician
face, turned to meet her in silent question.
By an effort the invalid raised herself to a sitting posture in her bed and motioned her niece to approach. There was little of the emotional ever about Madame St. Die, widow of a major in the French service, brother of a major also.
"So the Prussians are upon us?" she said quite calmly. "Marthe was up a bit ago and told me. It was in '70 they came before. I had hardly looked for them to return again during my life. Control yourself, my dear. It will pass. In '70 I was a girl myself as thou art now, and my heart bled then for France, as your face tells me yours bleeds today. Come—sit down beside me and tell me all that has happened."
Somewhat soothed by the words of the elder woman, Jacqueline seated herself on the edge of the bed and related in detail what had occurred.
Her aunt smiled slightly at the end.
"Your action in regard to the petrol was foolish, ma petite. But no matter. At your age I doubt not I should have done the same. Now all we can do is give quiet submission. Still—you might have thought to hide that bucket and funnel."
Again the fanfare of a bugle rang out, nearer, clearer.
"Be thou my eyes," said Madame St. Die. "Go to the window and tell me what you see."
Again the girl shivered but made no answer. Rising, she crossed the room to comply with the request.
The countryside so peaceful in the early morning was filled with a grim panoply now. Pouring across it, dark, sinister, came rank after rank of horsemen, dark-clad like those first who had come to disrupt the peaceful life of the château. Rank following rank they pressed ahead with the precision of some mighty engine of menace. Their black dolmans flapped in the air of the morning. The white death's head gleamed above their heavy faces. The little pennons fluttered above them from long staffs. The sunlight glinted dully from their service scabbards, stained brown to disguise their metallic luster, and the barrels of their short carbines, and shone on the whipping guidons.
Without haste or confusion they came onward, a single giant figure before them. And after him two, side by side, and after them five abreast, and then the mighty, ground-shaking mass of the squadron.
Nor were they all. Beyond them on either side, other groups of horsemen moved in steady advance. Behind each group trailed a wheeled something, from between whose wheels came now and then a dim metallic refraction. Guns! The artillery of the hussar support! They were pressing on at the heels of the army of France as they had pressed for days, without material check—a wave of hostile portent which swept resistance back or aside, or, finding it stubborn, rolled up and up and over it in a flood of men and weapons, and again pressed on.
And behind hussars and guns, long lines of gray—men on foot, marching forward and down, the light flashing now and then from the point of a helmet, the barrel of a gun—the serried might of the German, heavy, methodical as clock-work, mighty, pressing on. Like the accompaniment of their coming, once more she heard the grumble of far guns.
In a voice of choked emotion, she recounted it all to the woman on the bed.
"Courage," said Madame St. Die. "There will be another story, Jacqueline, my little flower. This was expected. Thy father and I have discussed it all many a time."
The girl's eyes widened. Her lips parted.
"Expected? This invasion—defeat—capture?" She gasped the words rather than spoke them in any connected fashion.
"But indeed, yes. What would you? France has known always that some day the German would bring the war to her. France knew Germany was ready as France could never be ready—as her people would never prepare until the hour itself made demand. In France the law is the people. In Germany there is but one law, and that the law of one man and his advisers. By one way and another they have educated their people to want war—have nursed the spirit of it in their breasts, until the people themselves have cried their Emperor on. So sure were they of the final step, that they have even spoken among their official circles of the time when this war should come as 'The Day.' France knew, but even so she hoped to avert it, as she has averted it at least five times in the last ten years. And France wanted to prepare. Why else the new military service laws of two years ago? It was a step toward preparing for what had to come. And now that the need arises, the people of France will respond—even though Paris fall, still will France fight the invader."
"And surely the English will help us," Jacqueline cried. "England, too, is threatened the same as France. The man in the aeroplane was English. He was fighting for France already. He was very brave, and strong, and he was very—nice."
"Ah, youth!" said her aunt, without apparent relevance to the subject. "Yes, the English will help us—must help us as you say—are doing so already, not only with men and guns, but with morale. France will wish to show England how she can fight. And England indeed is threatened no less than we. Both nations must fight for their national existence this time, my child. Well, what else do you see?"
"Motors and motorcycles," Jacqueline told her. "One car is a huge thing. I suppose, perhaps, the commander rides in that. And the couriers—the despatch-bearers ride on the motorcycles, of course. They say they can make sixty miles an hour."
"Imagine going to war in a motor," said the woman on the bed. "In '70 our officers did not so. What else, my dear?"
"Behind the column, wagons and trucks and funny-looking things with smoke pouring from pipes as they come forward. I think the last must be their field kitchens, of which we have heard so much."
"Our men cooked their meals over splinters in '70," declared the invalid behind her. "Mon Dieu, but times have changed!"
Jacqueline made no direct answer. Speaking quickly, she began to describe what was going on outside the château wall. "The motor is coming forward swiftly now—the big one. That Steinwald of whom I told you, and a couple of other officers are standing by the gate as stiff as sticks. Now the motor has stopped, and another officer has dismounted and is opening its door, and—ah, what seems a personage is getting out of the car!
"He seems a fairly young man, so far as I can determine. He has a long, aristocratic face, a mustache and broad shoulders, and a decided air about him. That is all I can see, except that he is handsomely uniformed indeed. Now everybody is saluting and he is walking toward Steinwald. Now he is speaking to him. Now he has signed two officers and is speaking to them. They have turned away, riding back along the column. Mon Dieu! If they stop here, where will they all get hay for their horses, and what will we have left for our cows for the Winter?"
"Can we help it?" retorted her aunt. "Perhaps they will leave nothing behind them which needs hay to eat. Be that as it may, we can only submit, we women, and wait. Long ago your father told me of a plan should this very thing happen. Those who love France foresaw what might come to pass. They planned how to meet it. Therefore let not a few horses and guns disturb you. Youth is impatient, but age learns how to wait."
"They are coming inside now," said the girl at the window. "There is a group of officers in very brilliant uniforms about the man from the motor. That pig of a Steinwald is leading the way. They are passing in at the gate and the cavalry is dismounting."
She turned to come back to the bed and resume her seat on its edge. Her attitude was one of brooding. A dull agony of impotence was in her heart—a heavy, useless resentment of this invasion of her country and her home, too deep to voice, beyond the power of words for expression.
Madame St. Die had leaned back on her pillows. Her eyes came to rest on the face of the girl in something like an anxious speculation.
Yet neither woman spoke. The rumble and growl from below the horizon seemed to set a faint quiver to throbbing through the air of the room. Down there where their metallic throats bellowed, men were fighting. Below this room where they two waited, the foot of the foeman was treading the floors of their home. To the one braced by the philosophy of age, and the other burning with the hot, unvoiced protests of youth, the moment was bitter—as bitter as women have suffered through thousands of years, while the men-children of their loins made war.
A tap, faint, halting, came upon the door. It swung inward gently to show old Marthe, white-faced, hesitating on the threshold. Her eyes were full of an awed, mute horror. Her mouth opened and emitted no sound. She swallowed as by an effort and closed it dumbly, still holding the knob of the door in one gnarled hand and trembling slightly as she stood. Yet her terrified eyes turned not to the face of Madame St. Die, but to the figure of Jacqueline, very much as a dog might bid silent farewell to a beloved mistress who was going forever away.
"Speak," said the woman against the pillows in sharp command.
Marthe swallowed again. She opened her mouth for the second time.
"Mlle. Chinault," she faltered. "They wish her below. They forced me to come and say it. I could do nothing less. They compelled me to obey."
Abruptly she released the knob and turned away as if to conceal her face. They heard her shuffle off along the hall.
The eyes of the two women met. And again neither spoke. But in that long glance, age spoke to youth, and the soul of woman to woman in silent encouragement and counsel. What of sickening fear, what of dread menace to youth might lurk in that call for the younger, each read in the eyes of the other, the widened pupils, the firmer lips, the fading of color. And with it each read the conscious knowledge of the futility of any refusal or resistance.
Jacqueline rose. She was pale but seemingly calm.
"You heard. I must go. In all I must obey them, as Marthe obeyed. Pierre and little Jean are hostage for my submission in all things. Mon Dieu, were I but a man—"
"As it happens, you are a woman, beautiful, young," said her aunt. "Come here. Down by the bed. Down on your knees." She forced herself up again and took the face of the kneeling girl between her two thin, hot hands. "The good God go with you, my child. Be discreet as well as submissive. They are rough men, their passions inflamed by the blood lust and the weeks of killing—and you are but a flower in the field of an alien nation, to be crushed for a whim if desired. Would that I, the old woman, the withered weed, could go down to meet them in your place, but—it seems I can not."
She bent over to press her lips to the other's forehead. One might have noticed that they quivered as they met the white flesh.
"God guard you, Jacqueline Chinault."
JACQUELINE rose from her knees. Her heart beating a trifle more quickly, she opened the door and passed into the upper hall. At the head of the stairs she paused a moment looking down.
The sentry still stood by the courtyard door, silent, motionless as a piece of old armor, his carbine slanted across his breast as she had left him. She went down slowly and found his eyes upon her, marking her progress step by step. As she reached the foot of the flight, he removed a hand from the barrel of his weapon and waved it toward the dining-room where Steinwald had had his wine, and from whence the sound of voices now reached her.
"You are wanted in there," he said in German.
She made her way to the door and paused before its closed panels to steady her control. Some of the color had drained even from her lips, and her eyes were unnaturally bright by contrast. What fate lay on the other side of that barrier of wood, she had no way of knowing, and as she had said of Pierre to Steinwald, she too had heard tales—dread things of horror to a woman.
The hand she laid on the knob was cold to her own perception. Very slowly she turned the latch, opened the door, passed in and closed it, to lean against it, before raising her eyes to face what might come.
The familiar room was now occupied by several men in the full uniform of the German service. They had formed a little group, standing by the side of the table. At the sound of her entrance they wheeled about. She found herself, on the instant, confronting the man she had seen descend from the motor some time before.
Seen thus closely, his features were not unpleasant. He had removed his helmet and placed it on the table. She saw that his hair was a light brown, brushed thickly back from a broad brow, that his chin held a little cleft, that his upper lip was covered by a soft, almost silken mustache, below which his mouth, somewhat petulant in repose and thin-lipped, was tentatively smiling now. The hand from which he had drawn a gantlet, was slender but sinewy, strong, a capable hand.
Even in that first moment, her intuition told her that here was a man, not of the common order—one to be reckoned with always, when met; who in peace or war would be heard from and make his presence felt; as unlike the gruff Steinwald, in his finished poise, as she herself was unlike the common woman of her people. She opened her lips.
"I understood that my presence was desired here," she began as coldly as her hands, which now seemed turning to ice.
The man she addressed thus indirectly, clicked his heels together in the subsequent pause, and bowed.
"It was I, Mademoiselle Chinault," he announced in faultless French. "I directed your old serving woman to request the presence of whoever might represent this household. I am Colonel Friedreich of his Imperial Majesty's forces, and I find it necessary for military reasons to occupy your château. You are in charge here—really?"
He had straightened and was eying her in a manner which, while not offensive, still gave evidence of a full appreciation of her charm.
"During the illness of my aunt who is confined to her room above-stairs, yes," Jacqueline responded with relief.
Despite his continued staring she found her courage rising somewhat. The man appeared a gentleman in every sense. His pose was that of one to the manner born. His instant reply carried out the impression completely. His eyes narrowed slightly.
"You have sickness?" he asked in surprised interest.
"Yes. My father's sister."
"Not serious, I trust?" It was the remark of an acquaintance, rather than that of a foeman.
"Until the last day or two, yes. She is convalescent we hope now, Colonel." Jacqueline was conscious of a feeling of surprise at the freedom with which she found herself replying to his questions.
Friedreich swung to those about him.
"Gentlemen, you hear? There is sickness in this house—Mademoiselle's aunt—a soldier's sister. Conduct yourselves in accord with the condition."
Their hands rose quickly in salute. The Colonel once more directed his remarks to Mile. Chinault.
"We shall make our occupation as little troublesome as need be, I assure you. I do not wish in any way to curtail your freedom beyond the exigencies of the case. You will be at perfect liberty to come and go about the house as you wish, remaining in charge of your dependents as heretofore."
A sudden revulsion of feeling shook the girl. Regardless of the relation in which they stood to one another, she could do no less than appreciate the ready courtesy of the soldier. She smiled slightly.
"If you will go a step further with your kindness and say as much to the sentry in the hall. I was ordered to remain above-stairs at my peril by Captain Steinwald."
Friedreich shrugged.
"There are times when Steinwald is a trifle overly zealous. My apologies for him. Better too much than too little zeal you must appreciate, Mademoiselle. But—the sentry will not interfere with your goings and comings from now on, I promise."
Jacqueline bowed.
"Thank you. Your consideration is so much greater than I feared, that it makes me bold to speak of another matter."
"Yes?" prompted the Colonel, as she paused, a bit uncertain now she had gone so far.
"Captain Steinwald also arrested two of my house servants to be held hostage for the good behavior of my people and myself."
"So he said," Friedreich nodded. "You see, my dear young lady, you and the man and the boy were guilty of an offense against the rules governing the conduct of our forces in an enemy's country, when you furnished petrol to that scout—an offense, indeed, which had your army been closer might even have interfered with some of our plans. Whoever helps an enemy of ours, performs an act against us, and while I may appreciate your personal feelings in the matter fully, yet Captain Steinwald was perfectly within his rights, believe me."
"But—" Jacqueline found now that she faltered. Notwithstanding the absolute suavity of the German's tones, she sensed a surprising element of finality in his words, against which she made none the less her little effort. "Must they still be held?"
"I regret of course, but I fear they must," said the Colonel as easily as ever. "However, you need have not the slightest worry on their account. So long as the acts for which their welfare is guarantee are not committed, as I feel sure they will not be, they are in not the least possible danger. On the other hand, to release them would not be expedient just at this time, I think. The chief value of a hostage lies in the certain knowledge of his friends that any act inimical to us will at once be visited upon him. Any indication of leniency toward the hostage on our part destroys his value. That, it seems to me, is a logical conclusion."
Jacqueline flushed. It had seemed to her that a veiled amusement had run through his tone at the last.
"Logical perhaps, but cruel, Colonel—without any pity or compassion," she rejoined.
Friedreich shrugged the least bit.
"Indeed yes. What place has pity in war? If you will read the works of my countryman, Von Glotz, you will see that he says no pity should ever be shown a conquered people. The more harsh the treatment accorded, the sooner will the spirit of the vanquished be broken and an ultimate peace attained."
Like an echo to his words, the men about him nodded their agreement.
"And you are the disciple of a creed such as that?" cried the girl, forgetting all caution in the horrified shock his words afforded. "You want me to believe you uphold such a doctrine—you, a man of education, whose bearing alone shows the quality of his birth?"
"I am a soldier at present, mademoiselle," he smiled. "Not a gentleman or a philosopher. In the Kriegsspiel, he wins who has the least compassion—preferably none. But enough. It becomes, as I said, necessary to occupy the château. I am showing you what consideration I can. As for the man and the boy, they will be held as a surety against any annoyance. If your people obey our orders, there will be no trouble. If now I could have a table placed in the courtyard to use for some necessary work, I shall leave you the house. We shall obtain luncheon from our kitchens, but dinner for myself and staff would be an agreeable change for men who have campaigned for weeks. And in addition we might have some bottles of wine at once—"
"You have but to command." Jacqueline waved her hand to the table where the tray and bottle still reposed. "Your Captain appreciated that equally with yourself. While less mild in manner, he was more direct."
The Colonel shot her a glance of understanding and chuckled.
"Steinwald is a bit of a bear and a bit of a boar with a dash of plain pig," he remarked.
"He exhibited all three characteristics, this morning," she retorted, still further nettled by his quiet air of amusement.
The eyes of the Colonel danced. His air of enjoying things increased.
"There is one thing more. I should be greatly honored if you will grace our dinner with your presence." There was a challenge in both his words and glance.
"Very well," Jacqueline accepted the gage. Of a sudden she found her cheeks burning. "I shall arrange for your table and the wine, at once," she hurried on, furious at herself for the sign of confused annoyance.
"My thanks in advance." Once more the Colonel's heels clicked as he bowed. "We shall adjourn to the courtyard at once then, Mademoiselle, until dinner. Munster—the door for Mademoiselle."
One of the men of his escort sprang forward, set the door wide and bowed with stiff precision as she left the room.
IT WAS past noon. Jacqueline found Marthe below
in the kitchen, which was located in the very foundations
of the château, and sent her flying to get the table and
the wine, with the assistance of some of the old men and
boys who had drifted curiously and yet timidly up from
the cottages below, and now stood outside in a chattering
group, discussing the situation with violently speculative
predictions as to the probable fates of themselves and Jean
and Pierre. With her own hands, she prepared herself some
luncheon and arranged a tray for her aunt.
In a way she felt somewhat relieved. Friedreich had been courteous beyond anything for which she had hoped. She could not doubt that he was at least a man of culture and polish. His diction, his intonation, his perfect command of her own tongue, all spoke of one who had enjoyed the highest advantages of education. And yet as she spread a serviette over the tray and placed the food upon it, her hands were still cold. There had been a hardness under all his surface softness. When he replied to her about Pierre and little Jean Giroux, it had even crept briefly into his tones, giving then a finality of decision one could not possibly ignore.
It came to her that she and hers were no whit less in durance, despite the slight extension of her personal freedom, than when the gruffer, more brutally direct Captain of hussars, had ordered her into the upper regions of the house. The sole difference lay in the manner of gaining the end desired, as she herself had intimated in her retort concerning the wine. In the final issue, she felt, the man who bowed and clicked his heels and spoke in polished phrases, would doubtless prove as implacable as the swashbuckler Captain who said without any consideration of conventions exactly what he meant.
She lifted the tray and climbed up to the lower hall. The sentry had been removed from beside the door. At the head of the stairs, on the floor above, she paused by a window giving on the court.
Already Friedreich and his men were gathering about a table on which were bottles of wine, spread-out maps, pens and paper, a typewriter of a portable sort on which a spectacled aide was writing. A man, putteed and goggled, was just mounting a sputtering motorcycle to ride off, as she looked out. An officer stood at attention beside a light auto. To him Col. Friedreich appeared to be speaking directly. He paused. The officer saluted and sprang aboard the motor to vanish with roaring engine out of the courtyard gate.
Some soldiers came in with a steaming kettle and a pile of thick plates. Papers and maps were pushed aside and the food set out on the table. Friedreich tasted it with a spoon, evidently found it hot, grimaced and made some remark at which the others laughed. From below the horizon again came the grumble of guns.
She had heard them for days, dull, muffled, pound, pound, until at times it seemed to her that they hummed and buzzed continually in her ears. But always, before, they had been from the north and east instead of the south and west. Then their menace had been of the future—always postponed—perhaps never to be realized. Now—she lifted the tray again and sighed.
While her aunt ate, she told her all her experience with Friedreich.
"The man is a gentleman by birth and training," she made a finish. "If I had met him anywhere else, under any other conditions; I should have considered him unusually attractive—uncommon indeed. Save in the matter of Pierre and Jean, he was consideration itself."
Her aunt nodded.
"There are no more finished gentlemen in the world than the Germans. They are an apprehensive race—that is they adopt the best of what they find in all races, to themselves. And they are adaptive. They can go into a country and adopt its manners, its customs, even its speech after a time. Their spy system proves that. Men's own neighbors, living beside them for years, did not know them for German spies until the war was a fact, and they were detected in the performance of the mission for which they had been ready for years. They take a brilliant polish.
"But—under it all my child is the basal stolidity of their race. Their polish becomes the sheen of the sword blade, under which the steel is none the less hard and cold. Of a logical turn of mind, they have reduced logic to the abstruse, robbed it of all human elements and emotions, until such logic, plus the national stolidity of opinion, has produced the logical result of hardness—polished hardness perhaps and more polished for that, but hardness none the less.
"I am speaking of the educated, the official class now of course. The masses, barring the primal stolidity, are very much the same as any other modern race of men, with their little lives and their little loves and hopes and desires. They are after all the material with which and upon which the logicians work."
Jacqueline made no reply as she sponged her aunt's hands and dried them. But she pressed her lips a trifle more firmly together. The words had been in a way, but a reiteration of her own subconscious appraisement of the Colonel. She put aside the bowl and towel she had used and gave the invalid a toothpick, which being somewhat proud of her still sound teeth, she insisted on using after every meal. Crossing to a window she looked out.
Save for the muttering thunder, which had rolled sullenly all day, the scene was quiet.. A half-misted sunshine lay over the hills. A motor was fleeing swiftly along a road.
Nearer, a motorcycle darted into sight in a smother of haste and dust. She could see the cavalry horses ranged in long rows, munching fodder, their riders walking about or lounging in groups on the ground, chatting, smoking, playing cards, one or two plying needle and thread in thrifty repairs. At another time she would have called them a splendid body of men—quiet, orderly, impressive in their dark uniforms and white-trimmed busbys.
"What are they doing?" queried Madame St. Die, behind her.
"Feeding their horses and resting," Jacqueline told her. "I suppose I had best go down and help Marthe out with the dinner, at which I am to be guest." With one of the quick mood changes of youth she paused to laugh. "If it didn't hurt so, it would be amusing, that—being a guest under my own roof, at a dinner provided by myself. I shall go now and see to preparing my own refreshment. Adieu, auntie mine."
She went out feeling somewhat lightened by her own facetious remarks and paused once more by the window and inspected the court. The group by the table had drawn together. The typewriter was going. One or two other aides were writing. Now and then as one finished some bit of work, he passed it to Friedreich, who signed it. Ever and again those papers were shoved into the hands of putteed and goggled men who mounted chattering motorcycles or autos and dashed off.
The whole enclosure seemed a jumble of autos and cycles, with here and there a horse, standing quietly among all the cracking of engines and switching its tail at flies. At intervals, as she watched, an auto or a dust-covered cycle and rider arrived. Men descended from them, approached the group at the table, saluted and delivered written or verbal messages to the Colonel or one of his men. To the morning's quiet of the courtyard, had succeeded an orderly haste of action.
She lifted her eyes. Beyond the court were two great towers of time-grayed stone, round, crowned by conical wooden covers. There were joined by a buttress of stone, containing rooms, now used merely for storage, but once the dungeons and keep of the old château. Pigeons strutted about the sloping roofs or fluttered up in idle flight to alight again undisturbed by the turmoil below. If one did not drop their eyes it was all very peaceful, with just the tops of the towers and the sunshine and the pigeons, unless one gave heed to that pound, pound of guns, as persistently steady as the pulse of a clock beating out the hour of doom.
Unmindful that she had watched the active center of any army division headquarters' staff, she went on to the far end of the corridor, where her own room was placed, and approached a window facing the west. As she had seen the cavalry from her aunt's room, so now the infantry appeared.
And the infantry were busy. Its men had thrown off haversacks and equipment and were hurriedly digging little slots in the soil, such as one sees dug for water-pipes or gas-mains in every-day life. They used little short-handled shovels and labored like navvies at their ditching. To a military mind they were intrenching, digging themselves in breast high. In those ditches they would stand up and shoot at a foe which attacked.
For some time she watched them, and others who were carrying great loads of bushes and placing them somewhat in front of the trenches at spots designated by an officer stalking in trim, tailored stiffness along the line. Her lips drooped and her hands clenched as she watched. Those lines torn out of the turf of her fields spoke so baldly of occupation, of her own helpless condition, of the defeat of her country's army, the giving up of her country's soil.
Driven more by the need of something to divert her thoughts from their morbid course than for any other reason, she descended to the kitchen and old Marthe, to lend a hand in the preparations for the dinner.
THE afternoon dragged along. About three the
pound of the guns died down, almost ceased, save for an
occasional distant concussion. At four came a soldier from
the artillery to the kitchen door with a demand for more
wine for the staff.
Jacqueline sent Marthe to get it from the cellar and invited the man inside. A sudden desire to inspect this foeman at close range, inspired her action. She wanted to study the man, find out what sort of being he was, gain a personal opinion of the individual private of this army which had come so suddenly upon her. She spoke to him in German, with which she was conversant, offering him a chair.
He was a heavy, blond giant with flaxen beard and small blue eyes which twinkled in friendly fashion. He smiled slowly on hearing his tongue from her lips, took the seat and after asking permission, produced and lighted a huge porcelain pipe.
"A cup of coffee, Herr soldier?" the girl suggested.
He nodded.
"Danke schön, gnädiges Fräulein," he accepted, puffing away.
She filled a cup and drew him into conversation. He was from Nuremberg and had worked in a factory for toys. He had a wife and three children, of whom he spoke, while he sipped at his coffee.
"This war is a calamity," he declared deeply. "War I like not. Now that the factory closed is, and the shipments go not out, there will be not toys enough for the little ones all over the world at Christmas. The pack of Kris Kringle will be very light. That is too bad, is it not?"
Jacqueline nodded. A funny little lump crept up into her throat.
"It is all so sad," she agreed, meaning that of which he spoke, and the war, and all it entailed, "such a shame!"
"Ja, so is it." He cast his eyes about the kitchen. "You have a very nice kitchen, Fräulein. At home, my wife, a fine kitchen has too, though not so large."
He knocked the ashes from his pipe into his palm, rose and carried them to the stove to empty them in. He smiled.
"Always at home my wife says, 'smoke, father, if you want, but drop not the ashes on the floor.'—"
Marthe came back with the wine. The man took it and departed, thanking them for their trouble. Jacqueline watched him. As her aunt had said, it came to her now also, that this man who spoke of wife and home and little children and toys was a bit of that common clay with which the over classes worked. Vaguely she found herself wondering if perhaps before long his great body in its gray with the scarlet facings might not become in very truth a bit of common clay and nothing more.
At five the gun-fire broke out with redoubled vigor and, as it seemed to Jacqueline, decidedly greater nearness, and at six came one of the larger boys from the cottages, his face distorted with both fear and anger, saying that the soldiers were compelling the sons of Martin Poulet and Marie Senlis to drive up all the cattle they had hidden in the timber at the hussar's approach. They were to be killed and boiled in the wheeled kitchens. There would not be one left to give milk for the children. These Germans were worse than a plague of locusts, eating up the country as they passed.
Jacqueline's lips came together. These were her people whose possessions were assailed. Not all the old feudal attitude passed from France with the passing of the king, or from the hearts of those families still holding their ancestral estates.
She dried her hands quickly and walked out of the kitchen. Without pause she went directly to the courtyard, where the odor of burned petrol was a stench in the air, and on across it toward the group about the table, with its litter of papers and maps, pens and ink, bottles of wine and half-filled glasses.
An officer, noting her coming, spoke to the Colonel, as she saw. Friedreich rose and awaited her approach, with his helmet tucked under an arm.
She spoke from the need of her people, unmindful of the apron knotted about her slender waist, or the sleeves rolled back above her elbows.
"Colonel, is it quite necessary to slaughter all our cattle? There are children among my people who need milk as badly, surely, as your men need fresh meat."
The Colonel smiled slightly.. His glance swept her from bared head to foot.
"To an advocate so charming, one finds it easy to listen," he said lightly. "How many of these sucklings have we, Mademoiselle?"
Jacqueline considered.
"Six young enough to depend upon it, and—" she paused a moment before going on—"Marie Senlis expects another."
Friedreich nodded.
"Being a peasant she should be able to feed that herself." He swung back to tine table. "Munster, go thou and see to it. Direct that two cows in prime milk be spared. Is that all, Mademoiselle?"
"All, I thank you, Colonel," she bowed.
"Good."
He turned to an aide, who began a rapid writing from his dictation.
Jacqueline retraced her steps, threading among autos and motorcycles to which it seemed fresh arrivals were being added every moment, roaring dust whitened in through the gate. Yet as she turned on the steps for a final inspection, she saw the man called Munster stride out on the errand connected with her appeal. In all that atmosphere of suppressed excitement, of roaring engines, and nearer, heavier, harsher pound of cannon, it seemed almost an incongruous service for one in his brilliant attire. Her lips twitched in a little smile.
She went back to the kitchen for a final inspection of the dinner arrangements, then, leaving Marthe to finish, ascended to her own room to prepare herself for the meal. After some deliberation, she selected a gown of sheer black tissue, made in long flowing lines, threw off the dress she had worn since morning and slipped on the other. From its low yoke and straps her arms and shoulders rose in a warm, virginal softness, made doubly fair by the somber color of the fabric.
Taking a small lavallière containing a diamond and several pearls, she snapped it about her throat, hesitated, then selected a single flaming rose, made of the softest silken substance, and fastened it in her corsage, where it lay in vivid contrast below her heart, the only spot of color in her otherwise funereal attire.
Closing the door of her room, she made her way back to her aunt, coming into a room of shadows, where the twilight gathered and the lamps were yet unlighted.
The little lady eyed her closely.
"Très jolie," she said brightly. "You should make an impression, ma chérie."
Jacqueline flushed in the dusk.
"Impression!" she gave back with a flash of fire. "Do you imagine I am thinking of that? This is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life—to go down there and sit in the presence of those men—the invaders—the violators of France. This costume is not to make an impression, unless it be one of mourning. The diamond and pearls are tears, the red of the rose is a wound and its blood." Her voice quavered, threatened to break.
"Come here, Jacqueline," said Madame St. Die quickly. "Sit down beside me in the twilight, as you have done so many times in the many past years. It is a time for confidences, the twilight, is it not? Then listen.
"You say this is hard, and I doubt not that it is. But why wonder? You are a woman, and war is always hard for women. They play the waiting part, and nothing is harder than waiting.
"Do you think the men out there bear the brunt of the hardship? Oh no—not even though they die. They die in the heat of action. It is women, those who bear those men and send them away to die or return, and remain behind to wait, not knowing, who feel the full horror of war. And what is this thing you are doing, compared to that? Yet the daughter of a nation may sometimes serve it—even by waiting. And to help you to wait, I shall tell you something I withheld from you this morning.
"I spoke then to you of a plan, of a time when the armies of France should fall back no longer, but turn and rend the invader. And my child, there were really a number of plans, each depending on the success or failure of the other. Should any fail, there was always another to be tried, even up to the guns of Paris; and if that failed and Paris fell, still there was a plan after that. But one of those plans had to do with a river, across which France should contest the advance."
In the fading light, while her elder spoke, the white breast of the younger woman took on a faster rhythm of breathing. Her eyes, brooding dully at first, began to shine. As the voice of the speaker ceased, she spoke in turn:
"And that river? Mon Dieu! Can you mean—"
"That the best service you can do France is to be submissive and wait," said Madame St. Die; "so that the German thinks us already beaten. He has advanced far and quickly. Of late he has rushed forward in even greater haste. He considers that he drives a disordered army before him, and—he has reached the Marne."
Jacqueline's breath caught in a gasp.
"You have helped me as always," she whispered. "My father told you this—in the past?"
"We are brother and sister and love our country," said her aunt.
"And you tell me now—why?"
"To help you as you just said—to give you courage, my child, to wait."
"But if they should suspect? Can they be so blind as not to have any suspicions? If they should learn of this plan?"
Jacqueline spoke softly, swiftly, leaning close.
"Learn?" For a moment the hand of the speaker, hot with the fervor of her emotion, fell over the hand of the girl and held it. "None here know it save you and me, at least. And—la child! What chance have they to learn—from two women of France?"
THE courtyard was full of the glow from auto headlights, the chatter of motors, as Jacqueline went down. Through the open door of the hall, she saw that the men about the table worked by the light from one of these so placed as to shine upon them.
She quickened her steps to see that all was ready, found the table spread and returned to the front, where she hailed a passing courier and requested him to take word to the Colonel.
Returning, she awaited her self-invited guests in the dining-room itself, as they came in heavy-footed, leaving a sentry posted at the door, the Colonel at their head.
As before, he clicked his heels and bowed. She felt his eyes once more sweep her in a bold appraisement as he straightened.
"Charming," he said softly, coming to her side. "To your graciousness of personal presence I perceive that you have added the final honor of wearing our colors for the occasion. That is hospitality indeed."
Involuntarily she stiffened.
"I fear, Colonel that I do not comprehend," she found herself saying.
He answered her, smiling:
"Your hair and your gown are so black, and your flesh is so white, and your lips and the rose are so red. And the red and the black and the white, are surely my country's colors, and never more charmingly shown."
She met the sally with heightened color and snapping eyes. This adroit perversion of what she had intended more as a costume filling in its somber details to her position, than anything even approaching his jesting suggestion of a personal compliment, aroused all the instinctive antagonism of her nature. And it seemed to her in that moment that, rather than being confused, harassed by this meeting and what she knew was to follow, her spirit gathered itself together, inspiring a cold clearness of thought and words. Her return of her enemy's smile was hard, brilliant.
"Now I comprehend. One does not choose the colors nature gives to one, my Colonel. One selects only the colors of the heart—the soul. Perhaps without really intending, you have given me the reason for a lifelong dissatisfaction with myself."
"Himmel!" Friedreich exclaimed, and included his staff in the byplay of wits. "Gentlemen, did you hear? We must have this young woman to Paris when once we have its government established. Both her tongue and her beauty would without doubt find appreciation, and the last excuse the former, I am sure."
"When your government is established, I will come," she flared in retort, her color rising.
"Enough," said Friedreich laughing. "Come. Will you sit beside me where we can talk? You see I am selfish, but why else is one a commander?"
He advanced to the head of the table and laid a hand on the back of a chair. Jacqueline bowed and moved to the place assigned. The others of Friedreich's staff selected places for themselves. She found herself looking down twin rows of alien faces, standing about the table, awaiting the lead of their commander.
He bent over and lifted a bottle of wine, filling Jacqueline's glass and his own, and motioning to his men to do the same. He lifted his glass and held it before him.
"A little toast, anent our recent verbal fencing," he remarked. "Gentlemen, I give you 'Hoch Paris!'"
For one whirling moment, she felt herself trapped, forced into an unescapable impasse at the very start. Then while she strove desperately for some solution other than the obvious one the man expected. For some reason unknown to herself, there swam before her mental vision the face of a man in heavy costume, long, square-jawed, high in the cheekbones, wrinkled slightly at the corners of the eyes—the face of the man in the monoplane that morning. And by association of ideas as it seemed, was suggested a way out of the position into which the Colonel's deliberate words had forced her. As the staff lifted their glasses and turned eyes toward the head of the table, as if awaiting her action, she caught up her wine and raised it, extended toward them.
"To Paris!" she cried in English, and set the glass to her lips.
Friedreich drank, set down his glass and drew out her chair.
"Clever," he whispered into her ear, as he saw her seated. "And apropos of your evasion of my little trap, suppose we converse in the tongue of that declining nation."
"Declining?" she questioned as Marthe began to serve.
"But yes," Friedreich nodded. "She is no longer virile. She has been too long engaged in the arts of peace. When a nation forsakes the sword for the artisan's tool, the national fiber of that nation weakens. It is the history of nations, which he who runs may read. Yet there is but One nation which has read the philosophy of history in its true meaning and kept her virility strong, even in times of peace. And because of that, it is the nation which will triumph over the degenerate and the decadent."
"Degenerate? Decadent?" said Jacqueline, and knew with swift displeasure that she faltered.
"Exactly. Degenerate England, and decadent France."
Somewhere within her, Jacqueline felt a little quiver wake and spread and threaten to engulf her; but she forced it back. And yet, save for that momentary tremor, evoked by the considered taunt she felt in Friedreich's words, that strange mental clarity kept up. It seemed to her that her brain ran smoothly, swiftly, giving off clear thought as a well-tuned engine might deliver power.
"Since you advocate the belief that a nation given over to peaceful pursuits grows weak in the martial arts, what about Belgium?" she said.
"Belgium?" Friedreich shrugged. "What about her? There was a Belgium once, I admit. Look at her now. The virile must and will overcome the weak. That is the law of nature—the survival of the fittest. Darwin had a glimmer of common sense even if English. As it happens today we are the virile among nations. Therefore—" He smiled.
Alternate waves of heat and numbing cold appeared to Jacqueline to pursue one another through her body and limbs. Conscious now of the fact that she was the object of a deliberate baiting by the man who addressed her, she was still forced to admit that so far as his personal attitude was concerned he might have been but a chance acquaintance indulging in a purely analytical discussion of a theoretical instance. His surface manner was courtesy itself. Even now he was himself fining her partly emptied glass.
Here indeed was the sheen on the sword-blade her aunt had mentioned, the polish overlying the cold hardness of race and studied training. He brought the logic of his statements to bear with the precision and impersonal demeanor of one demonstrating some formula or equation.
A sudden desire to force him to show his whole position, to antagonize and oppose him, swept her. In that moment she would have liked to strip the artificial veneer from his soul and unveil the man as he was, be the cost what it might. She waited until her glass was brimming, then folded her fingers about its stem.
"You are so sure—so sure?" she said, meeting his eyes; and even as she paused the air quivered with the grumble of far guns.
Friedreich's eyes contracted slightly. He waited until the dull rumble diminished and died, cocking his head a trifle to one side, as if he listened to them.
"Perhaps that is a better answer than words," he returned slowly, after the pause. "But to go on with words: Can you doubt it? We are here. The army of France is beyond us. We have brushed it aside at will or gone over it directly and gone on. To you that, of course, is painful, but one can not escape the logic of what has happened, be it painful or not. And unless all precedent is demolished, we must conquer. The philosophy of nations proves that. This is the beginning of the real Germanic prestige.
"Let us again look back. No nation ever rose to influence and power save by conquest. Where is there one? When they gave over conquest and the preparation for it in peace, the training of their youth to arms, they began their decline and fall. Take Rome, for example. When she relaxed, her manhood grew effeminate, her womanhood, fond of luxury, abnormally erotic rather than the mothers of the nation. And—pardon my frankness, but in France the same conditions prevail today—have done so until France has become the laughing-stock of more virile nations. England is fast reaching the same condition, save that she deludes herself with vicarious victories on the tennis and golf fields, and at polo, into thinking her manhood still capable of meeting a real test. All nations have done similar things toward the beginning of their end."
He sipped his wine for a moment. "On the other hand, as a nation we are young, growing. Our men are virile, our women are real women, not creatures of pleasure—toys. You pleasure-lovers, you devotees of so-called culture, call us brutal because we encourage such things as the college duel and those between our officers in the army. To you perhaps they are brutal. Admit the charge in the concrete. But they keep alive the martial spirit, the contempt for wounds, the familiarity with bloodshed. You call us brutal because of the severity of our officers to our recruits. Admit it again, but admit also that it maintains a discipline which makes our soldiers go where sent and do what is ordered without question; and further, that it robs the officer of any compunctions in sending them to certain destruction, if needs be, to gain an end. It serves a purpose. To that end and that purpose we have consciously labored for years."
Once more he lifted his glass and drank.
"And it is rather odd in your case that your own great man, the Emperor Napoleon, planted the germ which brought it all about. In the case of France, it is the story of Frankenstein all over."
"Frankenstein?" Jacqueline repeated. "The man who constructed a thing he could not control and was destroyed by it. Is that what you mean?"
"Precisely. When Napoleon conquered Prussia, one of his requirements was the abolition of our army. It was a Prussian Princess gave birth to our present greatness. For her favor, Napoleon rescinded his demand and granted us the right to maintain an army of twelve thousand men. That was the beginning. We kept the strict letter of the agreement, but not its spirit. So fast as the twelve thousand were trained, finished, we dismissed a few here and there and filled the ranks with fresh levies. At no time had we more than twelve thousand, but—in the end every man able to bear a weapon was a trained soldier. Your Emperor Napoleon III. finished the Frankenstein by welding a series of racially allied states into a firm national unit. Since then there has been but one inevitable result, for which we have prepared."
Jacqueline toyed with the food on her plate. To swallow it, she felt would choke her. Her throat ached with suppressed emotions, her mouth even felt dry so that she continually wet it with little sips at her glass.
"You admit then that the salvation of your nation and the beginning of her greatness was in and by the sacrifice of a woman. Some might question the justification of her course."
Again Friedreich shrugged.
"From a purely individual standpoint, perhaps. From a national standpoint the means must always be justified by the end. The individual welfare must always be subordinated to the good of the state. The state is the principal consideration. Against that the individual is nothing."
"You consider, then, that a woman would be justified in sacrificing anything whatsoever to win a point for her country?"
Mile. Chinault's lips curled slightly about the question. The Colonel gave small attention to her facial expression, however.
"Anything whatsoever," he returned without hesitation, quoting her own words.
"You hold nothing sacred?"
The hot blood of the virgin woman dyed her neck and face to the roots of her hair, flaunting the colors of indignation and womanly anger.
"The state—the nation, yes," he replied.
"And you recognize nothing higher?"
"There is nothing higher, Mademoiselle."
Her color faded as quickly as it had flamed. Once more she felt strangely cold. She let her eyes wander down the table where the foemen of her country were filling themselves with food. For any attention they gave her, she and the man at her side might have been alone. They ate and they drank with a clatter of knife and fork and china, the gurgle of liquid in a gullet, the smack of heavy lips. And they were all actuated by the same spirit voiced by her companion, who delivered his thrusts at her helpless impotence in the finished phrases of one trained in the school of worldly contact—thrust and thrust, not through ignorance and its blundering expression, but by intent.
In a resurgence of loathing, it came to her that she preferred the brutal directness of the man who had made her body the test of his own safety that morning, to this other. Steinwald would have harmed only her physical state at worst. This man stabbed into her spirit and brain with the skill of a fencer, and left them bleeding but still alive to suffer and writhe before his observing eyes.
She turned to find the tentative smile back on his lips. It was like the flick of a whip across raw shoulders.
"You are forgetting one thing in all this," she cried; "the one thing higher than the state. You are even forgetting two things, Colonel. In your logic and its conclusions, you are forgetting Almighty God and His Son. You preach the doctrine of Antichrist. Your philosophy is as material as your swords or your guns. Do you fancy that you can conquer completely, or long hold those people who forget neither, who hold something sacred outside material gain and worldly conquest?
"The people of England love their nation, and the people of France—ah, they love their nation too. And Belgium! The Belgians have fought, and died, and starved, and been tortured, and still fight, just because they love their nation, and want to go on living as Belgians. Even little Luxembourg whose national song says, 'We want to stay just as we are,' would have fought you, too, if you had not seized them before they knew they were in danger. You say we have offered you no resistance, but thousands of our people have offered you the supreme measures of any patriots' resistance and devotion—their lives—are offering it now down there where your guns roll and grumble—and will in the days to come.
"And in your wonderful philosophy, your splendid logic, there is one flaw. You say the individual is nothing, and I grant you have proved your words in deeds. Because of that attitude you have thrown your men—your individuals, away with a lavish hand. You are here today because you have done it, and because France and England are not yet willing to spend their manhood so freely, even when fighting for their national existence and their right to live. But before they give up this fight—that right, they will spend their manhood to the last unit, and each unit will be spent with its own consent—as a patriot and soldier, not because of a discipline so cruel that it inspires fear, but because he loves his country and is willing to give his life to prove it and give to unborn generations the right to live English and French. And the God who made races and raised up nations, will give to them the final triumph, when your driven individuals are spent."
She paused, her breast rising and falling over a hurried breathing, her lips parted, the pupils of her eyes expanded to the very rim of the iris, like the eyes of one who sees dim pictures of the future, still veiled to material sight.
A slow fire answered her defiance in the eyes of the man, but a fire born of material reason, material attraction. He flushed darkly.
"Superb!" he exclaimed softly. "What a pity to quench such a spirit in defeat! And yet, Mademoiselle, granting all due weight to your rhetoric and the patriotism behind it, I am of the unswayed opinion that the God you mention is now as ever on the side of the heaviest guns."
She made no answer and he went on after a momentary pause:
"What happened at Liege? Our shells tore their forts to atoms, buried their garrisons by hundreds in the ruins, left the place a thing of smoking wreckage, a monument to our artillery's might. At Namur, vaunted as a place of invincible defense, it was the same. The same at Maubeuge is now going on. In fact, it is always the same as we advance. You have nothing which can withstand our forty-two centimeter guns. They have proven the futility of all permanent fortification. Does that predicate any such result as you allow your very natural fervor to foretell?"
Still she sat silent, with something of the momentary fire dying out of face and posture. This passing of the verbal ball was all coming to her to resemble some ordeal in a nightmare of horror, through which she sat with throbbing pulses and eyes which at times blurred so that the line of faces beyond her became misted and distorted into the shapes of a dream. Her throat throbbed and ached with the stress of her emotion, and while she waited, like an epitome of it all, again came the rumble, deep, dull, like the roll of a ground-shaking thunder.
And in its midst, while it muttered and growled, low-toned, arrestive, came the challenge of the sentry at the door and a panting voice barked back at it sharply.
THE door swung open and a young man appeared. His
uniform was whitened with dust. His face was drawn, tired,
smirched with the grime of his journey. To Jacqueline it
seemed that his limbs trembled as he advanced into the
room, glanced about for the Colonel, sighted him at the
head of the table, approached, brought his hand to a flat
salute and stood swaying slightly upon his feet.
"Speak," Friedreich commanded sharply. "Your message must be urgent to warrant this interruption. Be sure that it is."
"Excellency," gasped the newcomer, and broke into a very torrent of guttural speech.
Jacqueline found herself gasping also at the first word he uttered. Controlling her first involuntary start, she sat on, catching all that she could of his unbelievable report and feeding her very soul upon it, while she watched the faces of the two men closely.
The Colonel's was darkening swiftly in an anger he made small effort to repress. When the courier had finished, he sprang to his feet and brought a fist crashing down upon the table so that his wine upset and ran dripping from the soaked cloth.
"Gott!" he roared in the full grip of his passion. "Gentlemen, this fellow dares to come to me, saying our advance is halted. Halted, checked! Heiliger Himmel! what a message to give to our ears, who ordered an advance! Finish your suppers quickly. If the fool says truly, there is work to be done yet this evening." He turned scowling to the man beside him. "Well—why do you wait?"
"For your instructions, Herr." The man appeared to stagger.
Jacqueline caught up her wine-glass and held it toward him.
"You seem tired—a drink of wine?" There was pity in her eyes.
The fellow eyed it, half put out a hand, and turned his face to the Colonel.
"Drink it, Dummkopf," said the latter, growling.
The soldier drained it at a gulp.
"Gnädiges Fräulein..." he stammered.
"Go now," said Friedreich. "Rest yourself enough to go back with my orders for a fresh advance."
The man stumbled from the room. Jacqueline watched his exit.
"The man is exhausted," she observed in a tone of protest.
"Exhausted?" Friedreich resumed his seat and glanced in her direction. "What of it? He has been over the road and knows it better than another."
He refilled his overturned glass, drained it and set it down empty, turning it round and round in his slim white fingers, his face distorted in a petulant frown of consideration. "Direct your servant to clear the table," he said after a bit, abruptly. "There is much to do and the courtyard is dark."
Jacqueline inclined her head. She signed Marthe to clear away. Deep within her a little trumpet of gladness was singing, growing louder and louder. Her eyes no longer blurred. They had begun to glow with an inward fire instead. And the room was hot to suffocation. She was no longer cold.
"And I would sleep under a roof," the Colonel continued. "Prepare a room for my use."
Again Jacqueline bowed.
"That is all."
"I have your permission to retire?"
The ordeal was apparently over. She wanted to escape from this room and be all alone for a few moments with the knowledge the courier's words had given to her heart and brain and soul.
"Yes," Friedreich nodded in almost indifferent fashion. "Munster," he directed, "send in any other couriers who are waiting."
Jacqueline rose, spoke briefly to Marthe in direction and quitted the room. The song in her soul had become a paean. In the stumbling words of the man who had interrupted the dinner she had heard not only of a checking of the advance, but of a yielding of ground as well. There was a reason why the guns growled closer than they had at dawn.
She burst into Madame St. Die's room, a creature of flaming beauty, which ran to the bed and dropped down and hid its face on the other's breast and gasped out what she had heard, and ran on after that first outburst to an account of the dinner and the attitude of the Colonel, and so on and on for an hour.
At the end of that time she kissed her aunt and went to her room, seating herself by the window, without lighting the lamp. She was still too full of the thing which had happened to try to sleep. She wanted to merely sit and warm the little new-born hope it inspired in her heart and feel it flutter and stir like a small waking life.
Sitting there the dull thud of the guns still came to her. As all day, they kept on at their labor of death though the day was done. But they were nearer—ah, nearer.
By degrees, however, another sound, low, insistent, made itself sensed—a deep-pitched rhythm which rose and fell as she listened; a thing like a vast chorus, intoning sonorous passages from some ponderous score which rolled up and up in waves of heavy tempo to her ear.
Rising, she opened the window and looked out. The sound came louder. Down where the infantry had dug that afternoon, tiny camp-fires sparkled. Silhouetted against them, she saw the figures of men. And they were singing. It was from their throats the sound came. The blended volume of their voices rolled! out and up to her in heavy, sonorous cadence, with the measures of marching feet: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," the words came distinctly now.
Abruptly she shivered. To a daughter of her nation there was something sinister, full of dire threat in those guttural syllables rising up through the night. Some of their menace entered her soul. Some of the elation roused by the courier's words fell away before it.
What after all was a checking of the foe's advance, a little driving back? Would it continue? They had come so far, these Germans. Some of Friedreich's words came back to haunt her tired brain.
"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," they sang down there in the trenches. And this was French soil where they sat and sang it. Already they had marched and sung this far across her fields and hills. Would it go on, despite this temporary check? Was there grim prophecy in those heavy-throated words, not only for France, but for all the world in the end?
She stretched out her white arms to the night-shrouded west.
"France," she whispered as to some invisible presence. "France, oh France, don't you hear them? France, oh France, shall it really come true? Dear France, can you not turn them back?"
For a time she still stood looking out toward the grumble behind the veil of night. Then she turned back and threw off her gown of the evening, but instead of disrobing, slipped into another dress and threw herself so on her bed. For a long time she lay staring into the darkness, listening to the sound of the guns and the singing. She reviewed the events of the day and coming back again and again to the very first, when the young English scout had dropped at her gates, with his strong, kind words, his pleasant voice, his chivalrous consideration. As his face had flashed before her at dinner and helped her, so now recollection soothed her and led off into by-paths of romance where youth might wander alone. He had said he might return. With a quickened pulse she found herself wondering if indeed the future might hold the fulfilment of that promise.
And so after a still longer time, with the sounds from without growing fainter and the hope within once more beating stronger, she slept to rouse now and then and sleep again.
Waking thus once, she heard Marthe's voice and that of Friedreich as the woman showed him a room. Later still she roused and lay wide-eyed and tense for no reason whatever and found the guns dropped silent, and sighed and slept again.
And farther along in the gray of the morning, she roused and started up with the sound of a shot in her ears. She sprang from her bed, still dizzy with slumber. The blare of a bugle was filling the air of her chamber. A sound of feet running came up from below her window—an outburst of heavy shouting. A second bugle snarled a metallic command.
She ran to the window and thrust out her face. Realization caught in her throat and half stifled her breathing. High, very high and coming toward her from the western hills, was a thing like a bird with wide-spread, stiff pinions.
The crack of a field-gun broke from beyond the château. Something like a great ball of cotton-wool formed and grew in the air, beneath the oncoming aircraft. The sound of the shell's explosion came sharply down to her ears.
Without losing it for an instant, she watched the aeroplane advance. It came on swiftly. She found she must crane her head to one side and upward to mark its position. Abruptly it banked and began to circle. It seemed to her that it swam in spirals, directly over the château.
A low whining grew in her ears, gathered volume with marvelous swiftness and passed overhead. A deeper, more rending explosion than any voice of a field-gun set the very walls to shaking. Hard on its dying echoes, she heard the harsh, agonized scream of a horse.
UNDER the gray light there was a scurry down by the trenches, where the gray infantry had sung their marching song the night before. They were scrambling up from sleep now and piling into those long ditches they had dug across the fields. They swarmed down, filling them with a mass of blue-gray backs, standing ready, their guns lying out across the fresh little bank of earth they had thrown up on the side toward the south and west.
Suddenly, right in their faces as it seemed to Jacqueline, a great whorl of fire-streaked smoke developed, flashed and writhed and detonated in a rending clangor and died. As she watched, here and there one of the gray-clad figures in the trench, sagged down to its bottom in limp token of the shrapnel's deadly work.
Her breast panting with the surprise, the unexpectedness, the terrible grip of it all and its meaning, she thrust her body farther through the window and looked up. The aeroplane still flew in circles, and though she did not comprehend its purpose at the time, signaled back to the distant guns on the hills to the south and west, the trajectory for their fire.
Beyond the château, off where the artillery had been parked the day before, a gun was barking at the great mechanical bird, like a dog at a hawk. She saw the little whorls of soft smoke as its shells burst high in the air.
Again a low whining came to her ear. A second shell exploded dose to the wall of the courtyard. The breath of its rending fanned her cheek in a sulfurous wave. Its roar set her ear-drums to humming. With a sudden realization of danger, she drew back and stood with both hands at her throat, staring out at the world where the savage passions of man were now let loose.
But, despite the momentary dread which had assailed her, she smiled. Greater than any fear for self or horror, was the thought which flashed in her brain. What she herself had cried for from this very window was occurring. It was a French 'plane which circled high above her. These were French shells exploding. France was falling back no longer—she was advancing to the attack!
Drawn by that thought, she stole back to the window. Again she caught her breath. A great spot of color had grown over there on the hills. In the growing light, she caught a glimpse of red and blue and the glinting flash of metal.
A body of horsemen had topped the hills and was moving forward. She knew just how they would look if one were closer—men on great horses, red-trousered, blue-tunicked, each breast and back covered by a shining case of metal, helmets on their heads, long, floating horse-tails flaunting from them—the cuirassiers of France. Again she clasped her hands at her throat. The cuirassiers of France! What her aunt had told her was true then.
Her aunt? She was alone in all this racket of rending shells and screeching bugles, this shouting of men and crashing of cannon'. With eyes flashing, breasts heaving, she turned from the window and ran down the hall.
A shell burst full in the courtyard. The window which gave upon it cracked and flew inward with a tinkle of glass. Hoarse shouting came up through the empty sash as she ran. In a rush of excitement, she reached the door of Madame St. Die's room and flung it open.
"Auntie!" she panted. "They are coming—the cuirassiers—the guns—France! France!"
The little woman was sitting huddled up in bed, her eyes bright, two spots of color in her sallow cheeks. But she merely nodded to the girl's outburst. In that hour she was quite the grande dame, undisturbed at least on the surface.
"Merci, Dieu!" she said quite calmly. "But then it is what I expected, and what I judged from the sounds. I heard them in '70, ma petite. Then for a whole day the French held the château, and the Germans shelled it. You have seen the marks on the walls. They destroyed the tile roofs of the towers, which we have replaced with wood. My mother and I and some of our people hid all day in the tunnel of which I think I have never told you, but which leads from Marthe's room back of the kitchen to the towers. Oh yes, I know the voice of the shells."
"But isn't it glorious, glorious!" cried the girl, exulting. "At last France is advancing, driving back the invader. Isn't it just splendid!"
"Glorious? Splendid?" repeated her aunt quite slowly. "It is showy. But when it's over—so many torn bodies, so many dead bodies of men—somebody's sons, no matter to which side they belong. No, my child, I do not think it splendid. But I am a woman. We women can never make war. We can only make men—the bodies which they throw away. Ah!"
Her voice was drowned by another infernal concussion.
"Ma petite," she went on when she could make herself again heard, "put a robe about me. I shall try to go below. I shall occupy Marthe's room back of the kitchen. If the French are determined to destroy my home, I should at least like to live to see what they accomplish."
Jacqueline sprang to obey.
"I—I'll get Marthe, and we'll help you down," she said, her words tripping upon one another in her haste. "You can't attempt the stairs on your feet. I—I'll carry you down myself."
"There is no particular hurry. Get Marthe. You two can manage," the invalid directed. "And Jacqueline—control yourself, my dear. There is a bottle of smelling-salts on my chiffonier. Procure it for me before you go. The odor of so much burned powder grows unpleasant."
Jacqueline Chinault threw up her arms and laughed, bending her lithe young body backward. Her face was flushed, her eyes sparkled.
"At least, you are splendid," she said and ran for the bottle of salts.
A bugle snarled again as she found it. Glancing from the-window, she saw the hussars mounted, saw them surge forward, obedient to the voice of the trumpet. Their dark mass was getting in motion to oppose that other mass of red and blue over there on the hills to the west.
She returned to the bed and gave the salts to her aunt.
"I am quite comfortable now," said that lady with a thin nostril to the uncorked vial. "Go fetch Marthe, unless she has hidden herself away."
Jacqueline turned, making her way from the room to the head of the stairs leading down. A sentry still stood in the hall. As she started her descent, he came suddenly to attention. The door to the dining-room opened and Friedreich followed by a part of his staff came out. He was belted and booted and wore a long military cloak, clasped about the collar of his tunic and falling nearly to his heels.
Sweeping the hall with his glance as he advanced, his eyes lifted to encounter the figure of the girl, hesitating on the stairs. Instantly his helmet came off, he clicked his heels together in the manner she was coming to detest and bowed.
"Good morning, Mademoiselle," he accosted. "Did they wake you this early? But since you are aroused, will you not be gracious enough to descend for a moment. This infernal din your countrymen are making, renders it difficult to converse other than close to."
The flush of her earlier emotions still lingered softly in Jacqueline's face as she began once more to descend. Her eyes still snapped with excitement.
"I was about to see to removing my aunt to a place of greater safety," she remarked, as she reached the lower hall and paused in front of the Colonel.
"A prudent action," he made answer, and smiled somewhat grimly as he noted her manner and expression. "Under those conditions, I shall detain you for merely a moment. But in leaving, it is customary to make one's adieux." Again he smiled slightly. "You are apparently filled with excited elation, and small wonder. Your countrymen appear to have found reinforcements somewheres and to have momentarily stiffened their line. The rather surprising outburst of enterprise on their part, indeed is forcing us to interrupt our visit for purely strategic reasons. Later I hope to return and complete it, more at my leisure.
"This then is auf Wiedersehen rather than good-by. But even so, I desire in leaving to commend your course of yesterday and last night. In all things you have acted sensibly and well, and your people have been orderly and well controlled. Such things merit appreciation. Therefore—" He broke off and addressed, the sentry, still standing at attention. "My man, I presume you have a bit of chalk, have you not?"
Apparently undisturbed amid the din of the shell fire, the sentry put down his rifle, unbuttoned the front of his tunic, reached inside it and produced a piece of the required substance, which he handed to the Colonel.
Friedreich took it, stepped to the outer door, swung it back and upon its broad panel, proceeding to write in heavy script the words, "Gute Leute," signing them with a single massive initial below.
"The sign manual of our approval," he said, handing back the chalk. "Should any of our army come this way before I myself return, all you will need do is to point to those words, and you and yours will be absolutely safe, and find your rights respected. Since you understand German, you know they mean 'Good People,' the highest praise we can give in an enemy's country. And now delay no longer in your intended service to your aunt. It would be a contretemps indeed were she to take injury from the zeal of her own people. Mademoiselle—until I return."
"Until you return, Herr Colonel," she responded, putting a vastly different emphasis on the first word.
Friedreich smiled for the third time.
"Still unconvinced," he said lightly. "At all events, auf Wiedersehen, Mademoiselle."
He replaced his helmet and signed to his men. At a word from one of the latter, the soldier shouldered his carbine and followed them out. The hussar's dolman flapped in his passage, and then he too was gone. She stood alone.
Turning she ran back along the hall and down to the kitchen in quest of Marthe. She found her huddled on a chair, her arms folded on a table, her face hidden in their circle. She ran up and touched her on the shoulder.
"Marthe!" she cried. "Marthe!"
The woman screamed aloud and lifted a terror-stricken face, recognized her young mistress and tottered to her feet in the grip of a life-long habit of service.
Talking, urging, Jacqueline half-led, half-forced her back to the hall above and up to the room of Madame St. Die. Together they managed to lift the invalid, stagger with her to the servant's room below and place her in Marthe's bed.
That done, Jacqueline told. Marthe to watch beside her, and herself ran back to the kitchen.
"Where are you going?" her aunt's voice floated to her ears.
"For something upstairs," she flung back in an evasive answer, and ran on.
Her pulses were dancing. She thrilled and tingled at each fresh concussion of shells. The Colonel was gone with his stolid staff—had admitted that he was forced to withdraw. The uproar without gave earnest to his words, and the hillside full of red and blue horsemen over there to the west.
The real motive of her present errand was to get back to a point of vantage from which she could command a view of what was occurring. Despite its horror, she found herself caught up in a compelling fascination which drew her back to the grim drama of conflict, a wide-eyed witness of the shock and grind of war.
She regained the front hall and fled panting up the stairs. To her ears the whole world now seemed filled with rending, crashing sound. By the shattered window in the upper hall, she paused briefly to look down.
The scene in the courtyard was utterly different now from that of the afternoon before. The busy bustle of men coming and going had vanished! She gazed on a scene of desolation. Several shells had exploded in the enclosure. It was deserted, the stones of its pavement shattered and torn and tossed hither and thither. The autos and motorcycles which had snapped and throbbed, had all departed, all save several cars and one or two cycles, rent by the shells, which lay in masses of useless wreckage. One of the former was blazing fiercely after its gasoline had ignited and fired its riven body. Even the top stones of the wall to the west were torn out at one point, leaving a ragged gap. A horse lay over by one of the towers in stiff-legged quiet. Blood had flowed from its torn body to form a dark pool on the stones.
As she stood, the chatter of a quick fire broke out, bringing a new note to her ears, causing her eyes to widen and darken. Unable to learn its full meaning from her position, she ran on to her own room with its west-fronting window.
THE engagement had developed steadily while she
had been attending to her aunt. The body of cuirassiers
still showed over there on the hills, and were no longer
in motion. But there was a new element in the attack which
caught and held her attention after her first swift glance.
A long line of men on foot, kneeling or lying down were
firing in her direction—or no, toward the trenches
which the gray ranks still held and defended with a
constant rattle of shots.
Abruptly, this line, crowned by little red képis, rose up and began to run forward swiftly in attack. Again the snarl of the machine-gun rasped out from somewhere beyond her vision. Here and there, one of the running men staggered, appeared to stumble and crumple up and pitch down into the weeds and grass of the field. Before her eyes the whole line faltered and went to earth again. Their answering fire crashed out.
Jacqueline found her eyes wet, her dry lips moving and muttering broken fragments of entreaty and pleading.
"Come on—oh come on, you red képis. Come on—come on! Drive them out of the trenches—drive them—drive them. Come on—on. Oh, God!" as they threw themselves down, "don't stop!"
But they had stopped as it seemed to her overwrought fancy. Yet at least they had gained some ground. Her eyes drifted nearer to the trenches. Whorl after whorl of flame and smoke flashed above the gray backs and died as the shrapnel again sprayed their line at a perfect range. Over at the extreme end of the line, a house which she marked as that of Marie Senlis was in flames and burning fiercely, its thatched roof sending up great quantities of flame and smoke.
Shrill cheering broke on her ringing ears. Once more the red képis were up and running forward. Once more some of them fell. They sank down and lay where they had fallen, the red of their little caps hard at that distance to tell from the crimson wild poppies which dotted the field they crossed.
As the line dropped down again, she saw an officer, brave in tight red breeches and blue-and-gold tunic, run along back of the rank with a naked sword glinting in his hand, until, without apparent reason, he threw up his arms and spun around in a circle and fell down, too, in the grass.
A little sick feeling awoke somewhere deep within her being—where maternity has its shrine, perhaps. She turned her eyes and let them stray from the nearer struggle to the cuirassiers. They still sat their horses inactive, save that now and then their ranks jostled somewhat as a shell burst here and their horses plunged.
From the opposite side of the château once more a bugle sounded. There burst on her senses the thunderous pound of many hoofs. Into view flashed a mass of horses and men, the mounts leaping forward, the riders bent over a little in the saddle, their weapons at the first position of the charge, the black dolmans of their uniform flapping out behind each figure. The "Black Hussars of Death" were flinging the weight of their mass on the squadron of cuirassiers! In its pure action, it was a sight to thrill and enthrall, by its perfection of execution. In its foreshadowing meaning, it was a thing to inspire horrified expectance. They sprang to the charge, troop after troop, until the whole might of their squadron dashed forward beneath her to hurl itself upon that other mass which waited—or no, the cuirassiers, too, were in motion. Very slowly at first, at a walk, then at a trot, they began to move in advance.
The woman at the window gripped the sides of the casement with tense hands. The trot had become a gallop. The two bodies of horses were rushing toward one another, seeming to gather momentum at each swift succeeding leap of reaching hoofs. What would happen when those two opposing forces met? What madness was this to hurl flesh and blood against flesh and blood in so insane a fashion? Who could expect to survive the crushing grind of contact, or, passing that, to escape the slash of sabers, or the lash of frenzied hoofs?
And still she watched, chained by the very numbing horror of the thing impending. Closer and closer the two squadrons rushed—nearer and nearer. Would they meet? Would they not falter at the very last and, swerving aside, refuse that final impact? No! On and on! Horses and men!
Merciful God, they were face to face! Oh mothers of men, they were together! Unable to endure that final sight of contact, Jacqueline covered her face with her hands and screamed aloud.
How long she stood there, shaken as by a chill, the vision shut out yet picturing itself none the less in her brain, she did not know. The grind of the machine-guns, the din of shells still went on half perceived. And after a time, very slowly, she lowered her screening hands and as one acting against her will looked out.
The two squadrons seemed to her straining vision to have become inextricably mingled in a struggling mass of confusion which writhed and surged and suddenly split into smaller groups that still struggled, until without warning, the whole scene shifted and the black dolmans reeled back and streamed off across the countryside with the blue and red in pursuit.
Of a sudden she realized that the shell fire too had diminished. She tore her eyes from the horsemen. Once more the képis were charging. She caught the gleam of steel as their bayonets flashed. From the trenches down there the gray men popped like rabbits from furze and ran stooping and lurching and falling, one here, one there, as they ran. A group of them turned off and lumbered directly beneath her window. She saw their heavy faces smudged and soiled and distorted. Their heavy boots thudded harshly as they ran. Now and then one of their number or another paused to fire a shot and turned once more and ran on.
The trenches were full of red képis. They swarmed up and over. A company turned and ran in pursuit of the men who had passed beneath her.
A passionate elation filled her. She ran back into the room and tore down a French flag which hung on her wall. She dashed back and leaned from the window to shake it toward the advancing képis.
"Vive l'Armée! Vive la France!" she cried in an unrestrained abandon of rejoicing.
They looked up at the sound. They saw her. Their faces brightened. The young lieutenant who ran at their head took off his cap and waved it at her, and, yes, he laughed—laughed up in her face with a gleam of teeth and ran on around the end of the château.
She lifted her eyes. Far over there, more infantry appeared, and a steaming auto, tearing toward her. A French flag flapped above it, whipping out in the wind of its flight.
She turned and ran out and down the stairs and out into the courtyard to pause abruptly at the sight of Pierre and little Jean, huddled down against the west wall close by a little door. They had been released, then, She waved her hand and they rose and came to her.
She went down the steps and out to the gate. Like a body-guard they followed behind. Off there to the east, the red-and-blue line still pursued the retreating line of gray.
The auto she had seen whipped about the corner of the wall and drew to a steaming stop. A man in a red-and-gold cap, blue-black tunic, and red trousers caught into the tops of leather puttees, hopped out, gave one glance to the woman, the man and the boy and removed his cap.
"Salut, mademoiselle," he cried, striding toward her. "I bring you release—I, Major Jacques Martout."
"And I give you welcome from my very heart," Jacqueline made answer, extending her hand.
As he bent above it, she saw that his dark hair was shot with gray. Like so many of the men of command in the Armageddon, he was past middle age. Her eyes misted momentarily as she thought of her own absent father.
"Had I known such a welcome awaited, I had pressed the attack even more briskly," said the Major. "But who would have looked for a vision inside these frowning walls? They tell me it is Château Chinault."
"And Mademoiselle Chinault who bids you enter, Major."
Martouts's eyes widened with pleasure.
"Dieu! Mademoiselle, I know your father. I am thrice happy to bring succor to the child of a brother in arms."
"Will you not come inside?" Jacqueline suggested. "The Germans left something, thanks to your timely arrival. At least let me offer you refreshment."
Martout smiled dryly.
"I intend to come in. My piou-pious will be back after a time. My orders merely embraced taking and holding the château. There will, however, be considerable to do, and I fear you'll have to put up with us for a time, mademoiselle. I think your father had a sister—is she also here with you?"
"She is inside," Jacqueline told him.
"When I have attended to details, I must pay my devoirs," said Martout.
They passed inside the courtyard. The Major swept it with his eyes. His smile became a grin.
"Mon Dieu! Our shells appear to have reached them nicely," he made satisfied comment, paused and was serious on the instant. "But I regret the necessity of training them against your home, little lady."
Jacqueline smiled. Her heart warmed to his gruff kindliness of tone and manner, so like that of the man she called father. Walking beside him, she seemed to breathe freely again for the first time since the morning before. She threw her head up proudly.
"Major, what is a poor house to give to one's country, when so many are giving their lives?"
The soldier gave her an admiring glance and nodded.
"Hah! What indeed, mademoiselle? You have spirit—the spirit. But—I see. You are a soldier's daughter."
Her bosom heaved.
"I—I saw them die—down there," she faltered. "I—I watched. It was grand—but it was awful. They staggered and fell, but the rest came on. And the cavalry—the cuirassiers—that—that was awful. Dear God, why must we war?"
Martout shrugged.
"Just now we must war to live—as a nation," he said.
A second auto pounded up outside. Martout paused and waited while several other officers came in through the gate. He went to meet them, stood and conversed for several minutes. A company of infantry appeared, marched in and stacked their guns on the flagstones of the court. While Jacqueline watched them, smiling, Martout came back.
"Mademoiselle, will it be possible to let me have a room where I can talk things over with my men, until we get matters straightened out?" he inquired.
Jacqueline turned her smile to him and nodded assent to his question.
"There is one the German commander used for a similar purpose. And last night he slept in a bed upstairs. I imagine you turned him out when you attacked."
Martout's eyes twinkled.
"Turn out and turn about is the fortune of war." he said dryly. "If you will show me this room—"
They ascended the steps to the door. Martout paused there abruptly. His keen eyes inspected the words chalked upon it. He turned them to his companion.
"What's this?" he exclaimed.
"Our guarantee of safety from German despoiling," Jacqueline flashed out, laughing slightly. "Colonel Friedreich wrote it himself and signed it, just before he departed so early this morning."
Martout snorted.
"Colonel Friedreich indeed! Were that the fellow's name, why has he signed this thing with a wholly different initial?"
He frowned and bit his lips in what seemed vexation. Mile. Chinault looked a trifle confused.
"Why—I hadn't noticed how he signed it. I had no reason to doubt his name. I thought him the commander of the forces which seized the château."
Martout nodded.
"So he was, and of a good many others."
The girl flushed and paled quickly. "Mon Dieu, Major! Just what do you mean?"
"That I am positive Colonel Friedreich was a title assumed; that we were close to making an important capture, had we but known of his presence. Your self-invited guest was a man of considerably higher rank than a colonel, unless I mistake, mademoiselle—a commander of one of their armies, as these words lead me to suppose. Mademoiselle, I think you entertained a very high official unawares—one they could ill afford to lose, these Germans—one I would have given my life to take," Martout shrugged.
The helmet of a cuirassier appeared under the arch of the gate. His horse was reeking and the face of the rider was streaked with dust and perspiration, but he rode forward in a manner almost jaunty, glanced about briefly, waved a hand at the infantry column and wheeled as if satisfied with what he saw.
"Devils," said Martout in an admiring tone. "Devils. Did you see them give the hussars a touching-up?"
Some of the color left Jacqueline's face.
"Don't," she protested, and shuddered. She led the way inside and straight to the dining-room door. "The quondam Colonel Friedreich's headquarters an hour ago, and now yours," she announced as she opened it wide.
A quizzical smile twitched the Major's lips.
"At least the man has the nerve of the devil to venture this far forward. Still—Fitzmaurice said he suspected it was his command, because of the Bavarian troops."
Jacqueline wheeled upon him.
"Fitzmaurice—Lieutenant Maurice Fitzmaurice? You know him, Major? Where is he now?"
Martout broke out laughing.
"Par bleu! Yes. We both know him, Mademoiselle. You're the girl who helped him escape!" he shouted. "Now I see it. He told me about that. As to where he is at present, I don't just know. He was up in the air over your sweet head when we attacked." "In—in that aeroplane?" stammered the girl.
"But yes, my dear. He was giving us the range to shoot to pieces your dwelling. I suspect he is now dogging the retreat to see how far it goes. And now that I know where I am to be quartered, if I could beg a bottle of wine—I think you said there was a little left."
"I—I will get it myself, at once," said Jacqueline quickly.
Just what was the matter, she scarcely knew, but her cheeks were burning as she made her way to find Marthe and send her into the cellars for the wine. Yet the sensations she experienced were not in the least unpleasant, rather they were pleasurable, in fact.
Lieutenant Fitzmaurice had been in that 'plane she had sighted, it seemed. Well, he had said he might come back. Of course she had hardly expected it in just the fashion it had happened—that he would direct the fire of the guns against her home. Still, what had she said about that to Major Martout? She smiled. After all, the shells had done little damage. She wondered how she might have felt, however, had she known it was the young English, lieu tenant who circled above her head in the 'plane.
She burst into the kitchen and ran on into the room where she had left Marthe and her aunt.
"Glorious news!" she exulted. "They are all gone, and Major Martout, who knows father, is upstairs asking for a bottle of wine. Run, Marthe, and bring several bottles and get some glasses."
The servant hurried out. Jacqueline dropped down on the bed and recounted all to Madame St. Die.
"And the young English lieutenant who was here yesterday morning was the one who directed the firing," she ran on. "He flew up and gave them the range and now he is following the retreat to see where it goes. Perhaps he will come back here—who knows?"
She sprang up and crossed to a cheap mirror over an old bureau, where Marthe sometimes arranged her hair, to begin a rapid adjustment of her own dark tresses. In the polished surface she caught sight of her aunt's face behind her, wearing a shrewd sort of questioning smile. Without any real reason, she found herself flushing again as she had on her way down on her errand for Martout. Now if only Marthe would come with the Major's wine. Ah, there she was.
She ran to the kitchen, took the bottles and arranged them with glasses on a tray. Carrying them before her she went back to the upper hall, pushed open the rear dining-room door and entered. Martout and several other officers, both of infantry and the cuirassiers, were already seated about the table. They rose as she came in.
She served the wine, was presented in quite a paternal fashion by the Major to the others, and suggested serving them luncheon, meeting with an immediate acceptance, which left little doubt of how grateful her offer was.
Despite the crowded events, it was still mid-morning as she regained the hall. She went out to the court, where the dead horse and the wrecked autos and cycles had been cleared away. The infantry still clustered there in tows and chattering groups. She remembered the burning house of Marie Senlis and conceived the notion of going down to see how the woman and her children might have fared. Crossing to the little door in the west wall, she let herself through.
She stood in the fields beyond the wall. She found that even while she had been getting the wine for the Major, things had moved. Down there in the fields beyond the trenches, a covered wagon or two bearing the Geneva flag were moving slowly, gathering here and there the wearer of one of those fallen red képis which looked so much like a poppy at a distance.
Nearer, at the trenches themselves, men detailed for the purpose were laying bodies in the long ditch and pushing back above them the little ridge of fresh-turned soil, which the Germans had thrown up. With a grip in her heart, she realized this hasty burial of the dead—grim aftermath of war.
Then, while she stood undecided whether to go on to the burned house, or down to those wagons to offer any assistance she might, or to turn back and make her offer of care for the wounded to the Major himself, from high above her came a growing drumming, like the sound of a cane run quickly down a line of metal palings. With surprising quickness it grew in volume.
She lifted her eyes. They encountered a great shape moving swiftly toward her, its exhaust rattling a staccato announcement of its approach. In the same instant that she placed it, the machine circled, its motor died, it dipped sharply, started up again when seemingly dashing to destruction, tilted once more in a lesser slant and came lightly to ground not twenty feet away.
The pilot released his levers, rose and prepared to leave the machine.
"Good morning," he said in English. "I appear to have formed the habit of dropping down on you."
"Lieutenant Fitzmaurice!" cried Jacqueline, her face flushing in quite unreasoning fashion, all thought of death and burial driven momentarily away before the approach of strong, vibrant life.
Fitzmaurice removed his goggles and advanced to meet her.
"Quite so. I told you I'd try and come back," he replied.
JACQUELINE put out her hand. Fitzmaurice took it. So for a moment man and maid stood facing one another. The day had brightened. There was sunlight in the air. A gentle breeze fanned about them, moving the draperies of the woman slightly, bending the grass in the fields and setting the real red poppies to flaunting their scarlet heads. The old château stood bathed in the light as a background, with its walls, its trees beyond it and its towers. The man cased in leather, his helmet still showing but the oval of his face, bulked large in the picture. So might some fair ancestress of Jacqueline Chinault, in those days when the structure behind her was not old, but a strong keep of feudal power, have dallied in this very field with a sturdy knight in armor, sworn by the cross of his sword-hilt to valorous deeds in its and her defense. Save for the ultramodern shape of the huge Bleriot monoplane resting on its rubber-shod wheels it was all in proper drawing.
Inspired by a spirit of perverseness, purely feminine in type, Jacqueline looked down and took away her hand.
"But I hardly looked for you to return as you did, pointing the guns which threw shells at my poor home."
Fitzmaurice's face fell. The light died out of his eyes. He pressed his lips together quickly.
"I know," he said a trifle stiffly. "And I want you to know that I hated the job. And all the time I was up there I was thinking of you and hoping—hoping you were safe—that you might have some place to hide in case the worst happened. Still, it must have seemed a poor return to you for saving my liberty—perhaps my life. I don't blame—"
Jacqueline threw up her head, caught the sleeve of his coat in her fingers.
"Stop!" She stamped her foot to emphasize the word. "Don't let me fool you. I am not angry, and I didn't hide. I—I watched you from a window."
"Jove!" Fitzmaurice looked sheepish. "You did—really? I say—"
"And," the girl went on with just a tone of pique, "I should think you would know that if it were necessary for France to destroy my home—rend it stone from stone, I would not refuse it. I would not! Not if it were for France!"
"No more, I fancy, you wouldn't," said Fitzmaurice rather vaguely and in some confusion. "You're—you're just about the nerviest girl I've ever chanced to meet. I said as much to the Major, yesterday, you know. And that reminds me, I've got to see him and make my report. But couldn't I see you a bit after? I left in such a deuced hurry yesterday morning."
Jacqueline smiled.
"Come," she offered. "I will show you where to find him. I was going down to see one of the women whose cottage was burned this morning and rather lost heart when I saw that." She waved her hand down toward the trench.
"It is a bit awful," Fitzmaurice admitted after a glance. "But, now that we're in it, what can we do?"
"Come," she repeated, shaking her head. "You must report."
She began retracing her steps toward the little door in the wall.
Fitzmaurice paused merely long enough to speak a word of direction to his mechanic, ere he trailed after his guide. Once more he felt himself thrilled by her beauty, her spirit, her bearing. That imperious little stamp of her foot had fallen not only on the grass but on his heart and set his pulses to hammering in an odd fashion.
She was strong, superbly alive. More than once since it happened, he had thought of the grip of her hands on the propeller of the Bleriot the previous morning. In a dim way he began to feel he had never encountered any one like her among all the women he had known as boy and man; that he had already, after a second meeting, surrendered to her charm and given her a place in his mind apart from all other women; that there really was no other woman just like her; that she was, well, just herself—just that, and—
"The Major said you were probably scouting over the retreat," her voice came back over the shoulder, cutting into his floundering thoughts. "Dare you tell me how far they went?"
"About ten kilos before I left them," he responded. "They fell back in excellent order, but came near making a record for the distance." He smiled slightly at the last.
They reached the door in the wall. Fitzmaurice set it open. She led him across the court and up the steps and into the hall where a sentry was now posted by the dining-room door.
"Go make your report in there," she suggested. "If you would like to go down with me to see the woman whose house was burned, after you are through, I will wait."
Fitzmaurice flushed with pleasure.
"I'll see you don't wait long," he accepted.
"And say to the Major that if I can do anything for the wounded, he need only suggest."
"Right!" Fitzmaurice nodded, strode to the door and spoke to the sentry.
The man opened the door. The lieutenant entered.
Jacqueline waited. She felt happy. The courtyard was full of red-and-blue-clad men. Beyond the château, as she had seen when out in the field, the cuirassiers were feeding their horses, with Pierre and Jean hanging about and talking to the men. Pierre and Jean were safe. Major Martout and the other men were in the dining-room at their duties. And Maurice Fitzmaurice had come back. He had a way of drawling at times in his speech, she found amusing, so she smiled. He had a strong face, but strong with a brave, kindly strength—not cold, cynical, at times actually cruel.
She caught herself up. She flexed her arms, forcing her hands up into her armpits and yawned, stretching her young muscles with a delightful sense of relaxation and freedom in the act. And she remembered the soldier suddenly as she did so, and glanced about to find him also smiling. He was a young fellow, seemingly in the twenties. Jacqueline returned his smile. The sentry grinned back.
She felt friendly, for some reason not just considered.
"I saw you drive them out," she said. "I watched you."
"I know, mademoiselle," he returned. "I was in Lieutenant Marchand's company. We ran beneath your window. If we had known you watched, we would have driven them out sooner. Nothing could have stopped us, on my word as a soldier."
"You are a nice boy," she retorted. "Have you a sweetheart?"
"But yes." He threw up his head. "Mimi. She wept when I was called. See." He threw open the long blue coat with its pinned-back skirts, and pointed with pride to a picture in a cheap gilt circle, fixed to the breast of his coarse shirt. "She goes with me to victory. When we have won—I shall go to her."
The knob rattled behind him. He straightened. The door opened. Fitzmaurice came out smiling.
"And now," he began at once, "I have nothing to do, for the present at least. Let's go see the poor woman who lost her home. And about the wounded: The Major says there are not many and he is having them sent back to the hospital base at once."
Jacqueline nodded and turned toward the door. Her heart was full of the simple little romance she had uncovered, of a girl's cheap picture over a lad's heart. Fitzmaurice had removed his helmet, which hung at his belt, and replaced it with a cap. Beneath it his face was young, strong, virile, smiling, like that of the sentry. The girl's heart warmed to its human appeal. Surely to such as these, she told herself, the victory belonged, would be given—must be given in the end. She led the way back across the court toward the little door.
Old Pierre himself was now in the courtyard. He caught sight of Fitzmaurice and hobbled forward in a limping haste.
"Bonjour, monsieur," he mumbled, bowing. "Nom d'une pipe, I never expected to see you alive again—me. Because of the petrol, they took my old neck and put about it a halter—mine and that of my grandson. We expected death any minute. For myself it did not so much matter, but the boy is young. You returned in good time."
Fitzmaurice's eyes leaped to those of his companion, and there was surprised confession in their depths. She nodded.
"Pierre and Jean were held as hostages," she explained, "but I do not think they were in any great danger. Colonel Friedreich held them rather as a precaution and to teach me his power."
"I certainly made you a lot of trouble," said Fitzmaurice. "But," he colored slightly, "if I hadn't I wouldn't have known you—would I?"
"It's all right, now you're here," Jacqueline returned and flushed brightly at the wholly unconsidered meaning of her words. "Pierre, go tell Marthe to prepare luncheon for the Major and his men. Stay and help her. Say I will be back before long myself. Come now, Lieutenant Fitzmaurice, we will go on if you don't mind. I must see the woman and get back quickly."
They passed through the door in the wall, and the man took his place at her side. So they went down across the fields, following a little path toward the cottages of the peasants, where the roofless house of Marie Senlis now smoked.
For a time neither spoke. The red cross wagons had driven off over the hills to the hospital, back there at the rear. The men at the trenches had given over their gruesome work.
Only the real red poppies starred the grass, nodding. But the man's eyes dwelt on the woman's face and figure as they walked. By and by a sparkle of daring crept into their depths.
"Suppose you drop the Lieutenant," he remarked. "And, if you like, the Fitz also. My name's the same at both ends. First name Maurice, last part Maurice too. I think I told you that yesterday morning."
"Maurice—" she turned to face him—"that is French as well as English." Her eyes glinted brightly. "I rather like it, I think."
"So do I, the way you pronounce it. Do it again," he laughed in a way not quite certain.
"Maurice—Maurice." Jacqueline's red lips were smiling like a reflection of that daring which had shone in his eyes. "It is stronger in English, but—prettier in French. Which do you prefer, monsieur—beauty or strength?"
"Both, when found together."
Again his glance embraced her figure. He chuckled.
"And—" Her eyes challenged now directly.
"You possess them. I can see you yet, twirling that propeller."
"Monsieur!" She flushed in a vivid wave of crimson.
"Gad!" said Fitzmaurice. "I sha'n't forget that—ever. Those beggars shooting, their bullets kicking up dust all around, and you there gripping the blades, tugging them around, not a bit frightened—just quietly doing what was needed, and be-hanged to the chaps. It was splendid!"
"Monsieur," said the girl, "your imagination makes much out of nothing, and—I think I was quite a good deal frightened, really. You see your fancy overshoots the case."
"Or falls short."
He strove to meet her eyes again and failed. Youth and life went on across the fields of death.
THEY reached the cottages to find Marie in the
house of a neighbor, and in tears. Her little home was
completely burned out. A shell had set it afire and she had
rushed forth in a panic, dragging her babies. She had saved
nothing.
Jacqueline softened. She became all woman. The finer human, compassionate side of her nature came into view. While Fitzmaurice stood by more or less embarrassed, she took the weeping peasant into her strong young arms and spoke sympathy and hope and promise of help into her ear. Perhaps it affected the man as nothing else could have done. After all, it is the eternal maternal, the wish to help and comfort, encourage and soothe which rouses man's highest ideal of his natural mate and keeps it alive. And because of the insight afforded him of this woman's soul, he was far more silent on the return up the path to the château, rousing only as they neared it.
"Jolly old place," he observed, then. "I've always had a fancy for old family manors and that sort of thing."
"It has been ours for five hundred years," said the girl. "Would you like to see about it?"
"Would I! Well, rather! Those old towers hold a fascination. One can imagine—oh, any number of things."
She nodded.
"Then after luncheon, which I must really go now and see about without more delay, I will show them to you."
"Right-o," Fitzmaurice accepted, with animation. "I'll go over and see what shape my mechanic finds the Bleriot in, then." He took off his cap. "Till after luncheon, mademoiselle."
Once more she nodded, smiling. He watched her vanish through the little door, stood and looked, after the door had shut behind her, and sighed, well-nigh outside of his volition, before starting toward the monoplane where it still sat on the grass.
And it was there old Pierre found him, bringing an invitation to the luncheon itself, at which Jacqueline presided, quite the little hostess of her country's soldiers. And it was from the luncheon directly, they passed out together to the courtyard, where the red and blue rank and file were also enjoying the bounty of the young châteleine in bottles of red wine from the vaults of the château, with which to wash down their bread and sausage.
They went out across it and approached a narrow door in the foot of the western tower, its padlock now broken and hanging loose as the troopers of the hussars had left it, after their search of the day before.
They pushed it open, went in and found a narrow stairway which led up and up past floors where were various rooms, once full of the life of the place, but now filled with storage and odds and ends of cast-off things from the present dwelling across the court. Narrow slits in the thick walls let in bars of sunlight, where dust motes danced as they climbed. From them, perhaps, archers had once sent their arrows against an attacking foe. Cobwebs and silence held it now, save for the sound of their footfalls on the stairs.
"It's rather like climbing the inside of a chimney," said Fitzmaurice as they mounted. "Take out the floors and remove the top, and you'd have a huge sort of flue. And speaking of that, and my range-pointing exploit of this morning, do you know what they did in Belgium? In certain towns, German spies, planted beforehand, fired the spires of churches. They burned straight up, making a pillar of fire by night and of smoke by day, on which the range-finders took their distance. You know we don't aim at our target really in this war. We point our guns up at an angle determined by a mathematical calculation. That is why, if the real target is out of sight, an object above it becomes of so much service." Jacqueline nodded.
"But isn't it a rather perilous task for the—object?"
"It's part of the game," said Fitzmaurice. "War isn't exactly a gentleman's game or pastime."
In the end they came out on a bare wooden floor, close up under the conical roof. Save for some boxes and bits of furniture, broken and cast aside, it was empty. But the sunlight streamed in through a final row of the narrow apertures in the tower sides, filling it with the light of the outer day.
"Jolly!" exclaimed Fitzmaurice after a first glance, picking up a chair with a broken arm, and blowing dust off its seat. "Sit down, Mademoiselle Chinault. You must be tired after that climb."
She took the seat with a shake of her head.
"I am not tired, really. I've climbed those stairs times without number. As a child I used to come up here and spend whole afternoons, time and again."
Fitzmaurice sat down on the side of an overturned box.
"What doing?" he asked.
Jacqueline smiled.
"Pretending," she said. "Making believe I was a sort of princess—one of those old ancestors of mine, when France was a mass of warring sections and battle a common occurrence. I would imagine that there was war and the château assailed; that I and a few trusted men-at-arms had been driven up here into the tower. I would walk about, run from porthole to porthole, encouraging my lusty fellows right royally to shoot fast and straight from their longbows at the foe. Or, perhaps I would cry them on to a desperate resistance against an enemy who had forced the walls and gained the door of the tower and were seeking to storm the stairs.
"And," she smiled more brightly, with lighting eyes, carried back on the wave of recollection her words induced, "they really fought superbly, those make-believe heroes of mine. But they suffered—oh, yes. And then I bound up their bleeding wounds with my silken scarf. It was really wonderful what a lot of blood that silken scarf would stanch. I think, on looking back, that I must have had an imagination stocked with an inexhaustible supply of silken scarfs, for there was always a fresh one to hand."
She broke off and laughed in a somewhat nervous fashion.
"Did you ever pretend, monsieur—or are such things left for girls?"
The Lieutenant grinned.
"Who hasn't? Your sex has no monopoly of that trick. In fact, mademoiselle, I haven't altogether outgrown the habit yet, at times. Only now I call 'em 'daydreams'—the things of make-believe."
Jacqueline nodded.
"I too," she confessed. "What are they—just fancies, or our hopes, our desires, our longings and aspirations, which we dare not put into words to others—these daydreams we have when alone?"
Fitzmaurice shook his head.
"That's psychology, and beyond me," he rejoined. "But whatever they are, I don't wonder you had them up here. The place seems like one to inspire them. You feel it—all the history of the years since it was built—all the things which have happened. What stories its stones could tell of peace and war, victory and defeat, bravery and death, and life, and—love!"
He paused for a moment without meeting her eyes, then went on:
"I once read or heard it said, I forget which, that after a place has been inhabited by people for a long time, it actually takes on an atmosphere in sympathy with them—their character you know. It's like that—the air of this place. Something elusive, to be felt but not expressed, seems to lurk up here, waiting, waiting for some one to come and feel it. It's as if each one of those old forebears of yours, who lived here during all the hundreds of years, had left behind a little of his influence to go on building up an impression in the place, an atmosphere which speaks of strength and bravery and conscious pride of power, holding it locked up here through all the years, until it comes down and is felt by—us."
She nodded silent assent.
"It's a sort of heritage you have," Fitzmaurice resumed, as if satisfied with her answer. "All those people seem to have left you a little bit of himself or herself. You can creep off up here and feel it, and it sorts of lifts you up, when you remember how they had their troubles and their joys, while they lived here and died and left the old tower still standing when they went away. It's a sort of shrine, that's what it is, and its history is still going on, still growing. Yesterday it was in the hands of an invader. Today once more its own people hold it."
He broke off and faced her, smiling.
"You see I have fancies too," he said.
The girl did not smile.
"Are they fancies?" she asked slowly. "I don't know. What you have put into words I have felt. As a child I did not realize it all when I sat here and watched the little specks of dust floating in those sunbeams just as they float now—as they have floated all the years. I just watched them and made believe.
"Later, as I grew older, I think I sensed something of what you have mentioned. There is an atmosphere about these towers, as if their silence was full of an invisible presence which spoke to my spirit of their lives and loves and made me just a bit sad, and just a bit glad that I am one of them at the last, and want to be worthy to—to bear the name as proudly as they did."
"Small doubt about that," said Fitzmaurice quickly and checked the sentence abruptly.
It came to him that this conversation was taking on a very intimate tone. That he should have spoken as he had in the past few minutes was surprising enough in itself. That he should have done so to a girl he had seen twice in his life was little short of amazing.
He rose and walked over to one of the narrow slits and looked out at a little piece of the far hills he could see. From behind him came no sound, yet he could picture the girl as plainly in his mental vision as he could the sunlit landscape before his eyes. There was a harmony, a rapprochement between her and himself, no less amazing than all his other actions since he had been with her.
Manlike he added a climax to it all. With the same abruptness which had characterized his last movement, he turned around and surprised her eyes with a strange expression, and a tiny smile on her lips. He sought to inject a lighter note into the situation.
"Come," he suggested, "let us make believe together. You shall be the Princess in the Tower—the—the Princess Jacqueline of course! And I—I shall be your true knight, sworn to serve and defend you ever. Now as it chanceth the tower is sore assailed and I have brought you here after desperate defense as a last refuge, where I shall make a final stand and guard thee with my trusty blade. And, by the way, where is my trusty blade? Still what matter? Imagination will transform the leg of a chair."
He caught up a loose spindle and brandished it in burlesque fashion. Jacqueline laughed, showing the pink of her mouth, beyond her red lips.
"Right loyally have ye served me, my good Sir—Sir Maurice," she retorted. "What though the foul foe howls below, need I fear while thy good right arm and chair-leg interpose 'twixt me and them?"
Fitzmaurice continuing his absurd antics succeeded in rapping one knuckle sharply with his make-believe sword, taking off a fleck of skin.
"What ho!" he howled. "See, Princess—I bleed. Quick with thy silken scarf and stanch my wound, that I may fight on to the finish."
He dashed toward her in simulated frenzy, sank upon one knee and thrust out the injured hand. She took it in her own slim fingers, which he knew were strong. The touch of them thrilled him through every fiber of his being.
Suddenly the make-believe was all gone and the real man knelt before the woman. The woman? Yes. In that swift instant, too short to reckon, the man knew that she was—the woman. That contact of flesh was the last thing needed to fire the thing which had been growing within him during all the last day.
His eyes leaped to her and found her head bent in apparent solicitude over his barked knuckle. He noted the wave of every tendril of dark hair, the soft line of her throat, the pure texture of its virgin surface.
The fingers of her other hand performed mystic passes over his wound. "There, 'tis bound up, brave knight," she declaimed. "'Tis an honorable wound, won in most valiant service. Doth't pain thee greatly?"'
"Lady," he cried out, "thy touch hath healed it," and his tone was a bit too fervid—too surcharged with real emotion to pass unnoticed.
Her eyes came up and met his. The real man and the real woman looked one upon the other in that glance. Slowly, like the rising of a beautiful tide the red crept into Jacqueline's cheeks, up to her eyes, to the little separate roots of her hair, flooding all her young face with the crimson flood of awakening understanding.
Somewhere above their heads the scratch of a pigeon's claws came from the roof, and the crooning of its call. The sunshine still streamed through the slits now centuries old, where men had shot their arrows in the grim game of war. Little motes danced in their golden pathways, weaving strange varying patterns, in a ceaseless ebb and flow, like the very course of active, vibrant life in their restless motion.
War makes quick beginnings and quick endings. Mankind, when each swift succeeding moment may be the end of all things, makes little of convention. At the beginning of the Armageddon, many were married in a night and departed from their brides the following morning, to return, perhaps never—their marriage the mating of the ephemeris, which measures its life in a day. One seizes quickly when one may lose all save what is taken in the brief span of a breath.
The man knelt still before the girl in the old tower of her people. She was lovely—lovelier now than ever with that crimson tint in her face, which his own words had evoked. He moved closer without rising.
"Jacqueline—Jacqueline—Princess," he said very softly.
The crimson died from her cheeks and she went utterly white. Very slowly she once more lifted the eyes she had dropped before his first fervid glance. At first there was merely wonder in them as he read it, but a wonder changing by degrees to something he had never before seen in the eyes of woman—a soft, sweet answer to the yearning in his tone.
In a swift surge, Fitzmaurice rose upward and caught her to him, his arms about her body, drawing her up to his breast.
"Princess," he said again with a note like that first wonder in her eyes, and put down his face to her hair.
She yielded to him, relaxing within the circle of his arms. Above them still cooed the pigeon on the roof. About them the motes danced on in the sunshine. But they paid them no heed. Youth and life and love, shut in, gave no space to what went on around them.
Theirs was the one great moment. The great discovery was theirs, so old yet ever new. That one sublime instant was theirs to enjoy; that first message of eye to eye, of soul to soul; that first grip of eager hands; that first touch of lips, like which there is no other, or ever will be, because there is only one first.
"Maurice," whispered the girl within his arms.
"Yes—yes—dear?" Fitzmaurice answered her gently. "Maurice what?"
"Just that." She was looking up into his face, her hands gripping his arms, leaning back against his clasp now, the least bit. "Just Maurice." A little laugh bubbled up low in her throat. "Oh—isn't that enough?"
"Jacqueline, sweet!" He caught her closer. She freed herself gently after a moment.
"Do you suppose they know?" she questioned.
"They?"
"Yes." Her eyes were dark and wide. "Those others who are gone? Do you suppose in some way they are here all around us and look on, and see what has happened and—and smile?"
"Who knows?" said Fitzmaurice slowly. "If they do, I hope they approve."
Suddenly Jacqueline giggled.
"What—a funny ending to our—make-believe," she flashed, her eyes dancing with a wholly new light.
Fitzmaurice chuckled.
"By Jove, yes!"
The first moment was ended—gone to join that invisible band and add its quota to the mystic spell of the tower. But like its echo, the girl's next words came pensive.
"Approve? Ah, Maurice, I hope so. I am the last of my family. My father had no sons, and with me the name dies out." She lifted her eyes once more to his and smiled. "No matter—the make-believe has ended just as it should. The valiant knight has won the Princess and all is well—even though his sword was the leg of a chair, and his Princess but a maid of France."
"A maid of France," said Fitzmaurice. "Jacqueline, our love is a regular international alliance. And, I rather think, that's the first mention I've made of the fact that I love you. But—"
She seized him, laughing softly.
"But you speak so well in signs, my Maurice. Come—I must take you to my auntie. We must tell her. No doubt she will be very properly shocked, until she comes to know you better and love you as—"
She flushed and began pulling him toward the stairs. He dragged back.
"Say it," he demanded. "I won't go a jolly step, you know, until you do."
"Say what?" Her flush lingered, but her eyes were innocently wide.
"I do."
Jacqueline pouted. With a roguish shrug, she laughed.
"I do, I do, I do," she parroted quickly. "There now. Come along my—my British lion."
They turned from the little bars of sunshine to the tread of the steps. They started down slowly, as if loath to go. Down there was the every-day world of man, and up here only the sunshine and the motes dancing, and the old, old air of the place and themselves. Fitzmaurice slid an arm about her. They went down very close together.
"You must think me an awful boor not to have asked for your aunt before," said Fitzmaurice. "It was dreadfully rude of me, but I've—had so much to think of."
Jacqueline shot him a glance.
"So have I. But she really is much better. She actually seems to thrive on excitement. She told me just before luncheon that she intended to receive Major Martout, who knows my father, and give him a cup of tea. Perhaps we will be in time for some, if we hurry. That should appeal to you. What time is it anyway, Maurice?"
Fitzmaurice dug out his watch with his left hand, rather than change the position of his right.
"Nearly five. Jacqueline, we've been up here hours."
They looked at each other and they laughed. Into their laughter struck the sound of feet mounting toward them, coming closer and closer, as if some one were climbing quickly, urged up by the spur of haste.
Fitzmaurice shifted his arm from Jacqueline's waist to a steadying hold on her elbow. His eyes narrowed to alert attention. They went on down toward the sound of footsteps. Half way about the turn of the tower, a blue-and-red-clad figure came suddenly into view.
The soldier caught sight of them and paused, bringing his hand up in salute-He was panting slightly from his run up the stairs.
"Lieutenant Fitzmaurice," he said shortly, between gasps, "I am instructed to say—that Major Martout—desires your presence—in the courtyard—at once!"
FITZMAURICE returned the soldier's salute.
"Say that I attend without delay."
The man turned and clattered down the stairs. Maurice tightened the pressure of his fingers on Jacqueline's arm and resumed the descent at a quickened pace. The contraction of his lids still persisted, bringing a new expression to his face from that which had held it all afternoon in the tower.
Something like fear began to rouse in the girl's eyes and spread to her face as they hurried down.
"What is it? Maurice, what is the matter?" she faltered, voicing her vague alarm.
"I don't know, of course," he told her. "I suppose Martout needs me for something or other."
They reached the lower door and emerged into the court.
"Ah!" said the Lieutenant.
One glance had been enough to tell him the reason for his summons. He released Jacqueline's elbow and pointed up and to the east.
There plainly in sight and coming toward them was a great thing against the sky. Its wide-stretched wings had a slight downward droop, which marked it for a military craft. Its tail-like rudder also slanted somewhat from the horizontal, and on its yellow belly was painted a short black cross. It was a Taube, one of those aeroplane scouts which the Germans call "doves," and which always hover like birds of ill omen above their army's advance, to spy out what lies before.
Martout and a group of the other officers of the French force stood in the middle of the courtyard watching the Taube's approach. Fitzmaurice left Jacqueline's side and made his way to them with quick strides. He brought his hand smartly to salute.
"Report myself, sir," he said.
Martout turned his head.
"Hah, Lieutenant! You see that fellow?"
He waved a pair of field-glasses at the German airship which now hovered over the valley.
"Yes, Major," Fitzmaurice nodded.
"I don't like it," Martout frowned. "It may mean anything or nothing. But the supports I was promised this morning have not come up, and I have had no word. That fellow may be merely after information or scouting the advance of a counter attack. Do you think you can find out?"
"I can try, sir."
"Good. But be careful, Lieutenant. Learn all you can, even as he is attempting, rather than trying merely his destruction. Slip by him and do a little scouting of your own, if you can. Fight if you must, of course, but—well, let him attack if he so elects. That is all."
Jacqueline heard. She had followed on Fitzmaurice's heels, edging in until she stood but a few steps behind him. She heard and realized the full import of the Major's words, while her heart leaped in a heavy, sickening pulse of dread anticipation.
She who had gone to the tower a girl, had returned as a wakened woman, with all the full woman's quickened intuitions and perceptions. Since that great moment up there where the sunshine filtered in through the long slits in the stone, she would never again be the same. The magic word which transforms the maid had been spoken. She had looked upon her mate and recognized his claim and surrendered herself to his keeping. And hardly had she done so than fate and the grim necessity of service threatened to tear him from her and send him into certain danger. All the new woman within her rose up and cried out in rebellion.
For a moment she closed her eyes, blotting out the sunlight and the great Taube sailing swiftly through it. A throbbing ache seemed to grip her throat and make her want to cry out, even while it strangled her breath and her protest. She pressed her lips tightly and waited for what seemed to her like a sentence passed on the one she loved.
Fitzmaurice's voice came to her as from a long way off.
"Very well, Major, I understand fully. I shall go up at once."
The blow had fallen. She opened her eyes. He was turning away from the group which watched the Taube—from her! The light which had filled his eyes up there in the tower was gone. They had grown hard, slightly narrowed, cold, bright. His whole attitude seemed changed, with all its boyish element hidden away. All at once he had become the human fighting unit of the vast machine of war. It amazed her and frightened her a little, and fascinated too.
His voice had been strong and vibrant when he accepted the order which would send him hundreds of feet into the air to do battle with that yellow monster with the short black cross on its breast. In his face there was no trace of fear, only intent purpose to accomplish the thing to which he was sent. After all, it was so she would want the man to whom she gave herself, to look in the face of danger—of possible death.
And he was hers—hers! As he turned she placed herself beside him. Her hand fell on his arm.
He started. It almost seemed to her that for the moment he had forgotten that he had left her there by the tower. And then he spoke with the masculine air of command for the woman he takes and holds from all others. .
"Jacqueline! You mustn't stay out here you know, dear. That chap might drop a bomb."
She did not answer directly. The remark seemed utterly trivial to her. She was not thinking of herself. Of what moment were possible bombs when this man to whom she absolutely belonged—would always belong absolutely—was about to do battle with the grim "dove" sailing above them?
"You're—you're going up?" she faltered.
Fitzmaurice nodded.
"Major's orders," he returned promptly, moving toward the door in the wall, beyond which was his machine.
She followed as he went quickly in its direction.
"I know—I heard," she said. "But—but—oh, Maurice—I've just found you."
Some of the keen intentness went out of the Englishman's face. His voice grew softer, more responsive.
"Sweetheart—"
She caught her breath in a long sigh.
"I know—I know. You're a soldier. This is an order—it must be. But I am a woman—and I love you, Maurice. Even the Major said to be careful. Promise you will be careful—for me."
They had reached the little door.
"I promise," said Fitzmaurice gently; she had grown more wonderful than ever in these hurried moments. "Don't worry, little girl. This is all in the day's work, you know. And you really must go back now into the house—where you'll be safe."
She shook her head.
"I'm going with you as far as I can. Come. Let me go as far as the machine. I'll—I'll—" she paused and seemed to struggle for repression before she went on—"come back after you are gone."
Circumstance drove Fitzmaurice. He dared not take time to argue.
"Come then," he yielded and darted through the door into the fields, running toward the great Bleriot beyond the wall.
His mechanic stood beside it, apparently waiting, as he ran up.
"All right, Dick?" Fitzmaurice cried.
The man nodded.
"Sweet she is, sir. I heard the Major send for you and got ready. We go up?"
"At once," said Fitzmaurice.
He detached his helmet and goggles from his belt and prepared to don them.
Jacqueline caught his arm. She lifted her face, all her woman's soul in her eyes.
"Kiss me," she panted. "Kiss me, Maurice—before you put those on."
Regardless of the staring mechanic, he took her briefly into his arms, straining her to his breast, bending his face to hers. The color had gone from her lips as he set his own to them, but they clung as if loath to yield from his touch.
Jacqueline sobbed once, shortly, with her mouth still to his. She tore herself away.
"Go!" she cried out fiercely. "Go; destroy the thing up there and come back to me!"
Suddenly she had flamed into the primitive woman, the primitive passion, standing back and crying her confidence in his ability to conquer—sending him from her to triumph and return.
FITZMAURICE gave her one final glance, jerked on
his helmet and vaulted into his place. The mechanic came
out of his shock of surprise at his officer's behavior and
ran to the front. As Fitzmaurice set up spark and feed, he
threw the great ash blades around and about.
The motor roared out. The mechanic ran back, as the great machine quivered and moved, and clambered up upon it. It trundled forward, faster and faster, bouncing a little as it gathered momentum, tilted, sank, tilted again and left the ground, rising up and up to enter the lists of the air, where the Taube challenged.
Up, up, the woman watched it. Once more the fire of sex and race died down and only the dread for the one who rode higher and higher into danger remained. She stood in the field alone, her head bent backward, watching the swift mounting.
Up and up! The Bleriot reached the end of its first long slant and circled. It was coming back almost directly above her. The roar of its motor came down to her in a harsh, grinding rattle and passed.
Abruptly the girl turned from her watching and began to run back across the field toward the château. She ran blindly, stumbling over the grass roots, her breath catching now and then in something between a gasp and a sob. The primitive flame was quite banked now and she was only a girl, and afraid. She reached the little door and ran through it to the courtyard.
Martout still stood there, surrounded by his men. The infantry soldiers had left off their milder amusements and were gathered here and there in groups, craning their necks to witness the aerial duel. They stood like children, with open mouths and expectant faces. The time which had been so full of love's agony to Jacqueline, had been but a scant few minutes to these men inured to the sudden scene-shifts of warfare. The interval between Fitzmaurice's turning away and the first fusillade of his motor had been no more than the space necessary for starting, to them.
Realizing all this dimly, she went slowly across the court and up the few steps to the door. And there she paused. She could not go farther—she could not enter until the issue was decided. She stopped on the last step, turned her head slowly backward and lifted her gaze in dull dread to the sky.
The Taube's pilot had sighted his enemy rising. Jacqueline, seeking for him with anxious eyes, found that he had banked and begun to circle. The yellow monster with its black-barred breast swam in steadily mounting spirals like a huge vulture, seeking to gain the advantage of elevation from which to strike the Bleriot, which had now taken to circling also.
Round and round went the great artificial birds, climbing higher and higher through the sun-lighted heavens, jockeying for position, before making any overt move, one against the other. So might two hostile rocs, in dim ages of the world, have circled over some cup-like prehistoric valley before they locked in deadly combat in mid-air. One of the woman's hands crept up and lay against her left breast, over her heart, while she stood on the steps and waited for what was to come.
A wisp of hair loosened and fell across her eyes. She threw it back in a swift gesture. She was breathing slowly, yet with an actual heave of shoulders in each respiration. Her lips were parted, her eyes dark, full of horrified staring.
A step sounded beside her. Martout's gruff voice struck half-heeded on her ears. He had noticed the interplay between her and Fitzmaurice as the Lieutenant had turned after hearing his orders, and he had lived long enough to read other things than words, and he was French to the core.
"Mademoiselle," he said kindly, "you are pale. Would you best watch? Would you not be better inside?"
She shook her head without glancing in his direction. Her eyes, her soul, were focused on the two great engines which still climbed up and up above her. Yet she sensed his words and was grateful for his interest. He was a man far older than she, and he knew her father. For a moment, it seemed almost as if he stood to her in the place of the absent parent. Her lips moved.
"I love him—I love him," she repeated, as if sure he would understand. Martout expressed no wonder. He moved closer. His hand slipped under her arm in support.
"Don't be afraid, dear maid," he encouraged. "The boy knows his business if any one does. He'll come through all right. Hah! What did I tell you?"
The Bleriot had darted in. Like a hawk striking, it turned from its spiral whirling and plunged straight at the yellow Taube, yet slanting somewhat upward as it flew. The paths of the two machines crossed and the German swung off slightly to escape what seemed a certain collision.
There was a sudden, quick flash from the French 'plane as they passed and then it was off and turning again to resume its circles. And it seemed to Jacqueline that it had gained in elevation and rode a bit higher than the "dove."
"Clever, that," said Martout, squeezing her arm in his hand. "He made the fellow dodge and gained the advantage on him. Now watch. You'll be proud of him when this is finished."
Some of the tense strain went out of her body. For the first time, she turned her face briefly to her companion.
"He's higher up than the other, isn't he?" she questioned.
"Yes. That's where he should be," Martout nodded. "Now watch."
The Bleriot was still spinning circles of air, high up, and the great Taube seemed trying to regain what had been wrested from it by mounting also. It was climbing quickly, too, but in a wider circle than the Bleriot used. Abruptly the latter swung out, however, and instead of a circle, described a figure of eight. In so doing, it crossed directly above the path of its foe-man.
Again came a stabbing flash from its body as it darted over. The Taube lurched slightly in a quick response. From it, too, stabbed little jets of flame, half seen in the late light of the afternoon.
The Bleriot swung out far to one side, turned and headed back to the attack. The Taube gave over its attempt to mount above its antagonist and darted off to one side itself. More shots flashed from its body. Their crackle drifted down thin, almost vanished ere they reached the ear.
But the Taube had gained some distance. To one side it now turned in a longer rising arc to gain the level of the other craft, still swimming somewhat above it.
To the woman watching, there came a recollection of a Japanese print she had once seen, depicting the struggle between two hostile kites, which hovered one over the other and struck with wings and talons and beaks. There seemed something like that in this aerial contest between the Bleriot, lithe, hawklike, and the drooping winged "dove." It came to her that each typified the race which had brought it into being: the one agile, quicker of control and motion; the other partaking more of the sturdiness of its builders, somewhat slower in action, but dogged to a degree in its steady persistency of purpose.
The Taube mounted in a long, reaching circle. The Bleriot checked its rush swiftly and turned. Once more it charged to intercept the course of the German in a headlong rush. Unexpectedly, however, it sheered off, slanting slightly so that instead of heading the other machine, it shot in behind it.
Jacqueline felt the hand of the man who held her arm contract on her flesh. She heard him suck in his breath in a sibilant hissing of understanding and expectation. Dimly she heard a staccato chatter like the explosion of a package of small crackers, falling all about her, and then Martout's voice full of exultation:
"Nom du nom! He got at him with his quickfire. Dieu! Look!"
The great yellow "dove" lurched like a wounded creature. Full in mid-heaven it staggered and seemed to lose headway and sink back like an exhausted climber. Recovering itself quickly, however, after that sickening moment, it headed away on a long tangent. But it no longer mounted. In fact, it seemed to the girl who watched that it sank even somewhat lower yet, before it caught itself fully and turned completely away in what appeared an effort at escape.
And the Bleriot fled after. Like literal dove and hawk now, the two machines darted off toward the eastern hills, the one pursuing, the other in a long reach across the sky. And the Bleriot seemed the faster. The hawk was overtaking the dove in each swift succeeding moment.
Fire again stabbed from the front machine. Again came the queer, faint popping, like the powder toys of children. And again the Bleriot replied in kind.
Again the Taube staggered. Only this time it seemed unable to rise above its wounds. Its stagger became a dizzy swaying. It lurched this way and that, as if beyond all control. In the end it tilted on edge, till it hung like a great wide-finned flying fish in the air, trembled, quivered and turned completely over. Two little dark specks fell away from its distorted outline, and dropped swiftly downward. The Taube hovered for yet a moment and then plunged after, whirling, turning, twisting in its fall.
And the thing which had slain it, the Bleriot, without pause or check, fled on toward the hills to the north and east, to learn what lay behind them and bring back the word.
For the first time that afternoon, as it seemed to her, Jacqueline became conscious of the fact that, as on the day before, the grim guns grumbled and fretted oh beyond the horizon. They came almost as a requiem for the great dove and the little black dots which had fallen from it just before it, too, fell. And dimly she heard the pound of hoofs, as a troop of cuirassiers dashed off toward the spot where men and machine had fallen.
"HE had him well," Martout's voice buzzed in her
ears.
In fact, everything was buzzing. A sense of deadly sickness was rising up and making her terribly faint. She thought she turned her head so as to face the Major. His face was strangely blurred, like a face seen through rippling water. And what was this choking stuff in her throat? And why were her eyes closed when she was trying to see the Major? How could one see anything when one's eyes were closed? Well, now that she realized that they were closed, she would open them, even though their lids weighed so heavy. Oh, there was the Major now!
He bent above her. His arm was about her and she was in a chair, and he had a wine-glass at her lips, and there was wine running down her neck inside her dress and wetting her body with tiny cold trickles across the skin of her chest. She struggled to sit up and looked about her.
She was in the dining-room. Mon Dieu! Had she fainted? The blood surged back into her face in a reactionary flood.
"Major!" she faltered. "Forgive me. I—I don't know how it happened. I—oh, I am ashamed."
Martout set his glass of wine on the table.
"Nom sacré!" he swore. "You have nothing to be ashamed of. You are a brave woman, my child. Fitzmaurice is infernally lucky to win a girl like you and then pull off a thing like this before her eyes. Hah! Were I twenty years younger, I'd give him a race, the rascal. En vérité!"
Jacqueline staggered up, holding on to the back of the chair.
"It was good of you to take care of me," she said, and forced a smile to her lips. "I'm quite all right now, Major. I—I think it's been everything the last two days, was the matter. They've been rather trying. I—I think I'll go now to my aunt."
Martout nodded.
"A fine lady," he made answer. "I paid my respects while you children played in the tower. A woman of spirit. Good blood in the Chinault."
"I shall go tell her what has happened," Jacqueline reaffirmed.
"Do," said the Major. "You will feel better, believe me. Two can bear either joy or sorrow so much better than one."
He bowed and retired through the door.
Jacqueline waited until he was gone, lifted the glass of wine and drained it. Safe! He was safe! Her heart resumed more its normal beating, sending the rich blood of youth through artery and vein. Her eyes began to sparkle darkly.
She smiled. Her man had conquered! By and by he would be coming back from his errand to her arms. She would, as she had said to the Major, go down and tell her aunt all that had happened. All? She flushed again as she followed the Major's footsteps to the door, and into the hall.
How would her aunt receive the information? Would she be surprised? There was that shrewd glance she had seen in Marthe's little mirror that morning.
She found Pierre and little Jean in the kitchen, drew the former aside and sent him on an errand, which was, after all, but to go outside and watch for the first sign of the Bleriot's return. Then she went over and opened the door to Marthe's room and went in, closing the door behind her.
Marthe was with the little old lady. Jacqueline waved her away.
"I wish to speak with my aunt," she said.
Marthe departed.
Youth and age looked into each other's eyes. Both were women. Youth went to its knees before age, laying its flushed cheek on the counterpane of the bed and taking fast hold of the hand of age.
"Auntie," murmured the girl. "Auntie dear."
Age took away its hand, lifted itself and placed both palms on the face of youth, forcing it up until once more it could look into those other eyes. For a time it said nothing, then it nodded and sighed:
"You left me a child—you come back a woman. There is something new in your eyes, my dear one. You have lived one of life's great moments since you left me, of which a woman has three—the day when she knows that she loves a man—the day of her marriage to him—and the day when she knows that by him she has conceived of a child. Speak—tell me. Once I too was young."
And youth with the hand of age in its own, its other hand on her hair, faltered out the tale of the tower and all which followed, and how it had watched, and what it had feared, and what it had hoped, and how it all had ended, and how now it was waiting for the Bleriot to return and had sent Pierre out to watch.
Youth lifted her face.
"Oh," she cried. "It was dreadful—my heart died within me. And then—then it was all over. The Taube fell, whirling over and over. And Maurice—ah, Maurice had won!"
She sprang up, throwing her arms out wide in a gesture, dropping them to clasp her fingers before her and stand with eyes half closed, lips half parted, head slightly back.
"Youth," said her aunt. "Ah, dear youth! Come here, my child."
Jacqueline crept back to her side. The arms of age went around her, drew her close. The lips of age sought her cheek and pressed it.
"When he comes back, you must bring this man of yours to me," said age. "I want to look into his eyes as I have into yours. We have been a proud race, we Chinaults, of which you are the last. And so—well, bring him to me. I would see the man who can win you in twenty-four hours and bring that light to your face."
Jacqueline's arms crept about the frailer figure. Her face dropped on the slender shoulder.
"Auntie," she whispered. "Oh, Auntie, dear—"
Pierre quavered from beyond the door: "Mademoiselle—it comes—the big machine. It flies toward the château like a pigeon."
Jacqueline freed herself and sprang up.
"So soon as I may, I will bring him," she promised. "And, oh, auntie, you must love him—you must! Because—because—don't you like the name of Fitzmaurice?"
Madame St. Die sniffed.
"You've reached that stage, have you?" she inquired dryly. "You've been saying it over, have you—Jacqueline Fitzmaurice—just to see how it would sound? Go. You're on pins and needles. But bring him back here. A—a cat may look at a king, I suppose?"
"But," said the girl, "she mustn't claw him."
She turned to run from the room. She lost no time in going back through the house, but ran straight out from the kitchen door to the fields beyond, lifting her eyes for a sight of the Bleriot's returning.
High up, it was already slanting downward in a long dive. It fell swiftly, caught, tilted up somewhat from its own momentum, dipped again with complete grace and slid down to its landing, while she still ran on to meet it.
Fitzmaurice sprang out and started to meet her. He caught her hands outstretched and drew her to him, circled her with his arms. She lay with her hands on his breast, her head a little back, smiling into his face.
"Maurice," she half sobbed, "my brave one—You conquered. It was dreadful. My blood turned to water and then to fire."
Fitzmaurice threw back his helmet and kissed her. He caught her again by the hand.
"Come, dear, I must get to the Major," he admonished. "He won't like what I have to tell him, but he's got to hear it."
She ran like a child in his leading toward the château, not speaking but keeping pace. Through the little door in the wall they plunged, and once more her companion released her and went toward Martout and his associate commanders, where they were clustered on the steps.
But though she walked alone now, Jacqueline followed. She was in time to catch Fitzmaurice's report.
"An apparent advance in force," were the words which caught her ears as she approached. The Major frowned.
"Name of a dog?" he growled. "Why have not my own supports come up? Where are the reenforcements which they promised to me this morning? Hold the château, they said. But how hold it? Gentlemen," he suddenly included the officers about him, "you have heard. We have a regiment of foot, a few guns and some cuirassiers. What can we do against this mass of superior numbers? We can fight, of course—we can die or be captured. Either way that is a loss to France. Or we can retire on our support, wherever it is—and perhaps return later. Fitzmaurice, you saw nothing of our missing reenforcements while you were up?"
"No, Major," the Lieutenant replied.
Martout made no further comment. He stood in deep consideration, his features drawn into lines of serious portent. The men about him voiced no opinion at the moment. Like his own, however, their faces showed the gravity of the situation.
Fitzmaurice turned to Jacqueline behind him.
"Did you hear?" he said in a lowered tone. "If we retire or not, you can't stay here to meet what will come. There must be no repetition of yesterday morning. You must get your aunt dressed and be ready to go—there will be time to arrange it. I'll fix it with the Major for you to go in one of the autos when we leave, or have one to use if we don't. You'll go for me, won't you, dear?"
She turned her eyes about the courtyard. Life with her was coming to be a thing of swift transitions. This was her home, where she had lived the bulk of her life. Till the day before she had given little thought to really leaving it and going anywhere else. Now this strange, strong man of hers was calling her away. He had come into her life but the day before and already had made her life his. Womanlike, she answered the call—
"I will go anywhere—with you—or for you, Maurice."
She moved to one side slightly, in order to pass behind the group of sober-faced men on the steps.
Martout appeared to reach some definite decision. He came out of his abstraction and lifted his head.
"One moment," he said almost sharply. "Where are you going, mademoiselle?"
Jacqueline arrested her steps to answer:
"To my aunt, Major. I scarcely think that I care to remain to receive Colonel Friedreich Wilhelm again. If you depart, I would rather go also and take my aunt."
"Wait," said the Major, and again addressed the men about him. "Gentlemen,' allow me to suggest that we adjourn to the house. There is a matter about which I wish to consult both Mademoiselle Chinault and you."
HE offered no further explanation as he led the way inside, down the hall to the door of the dining-room and through it; nor did any of those who followed venture an expression of opinion as for what he was inviting them to this consultation. If their features showed forth something of surprise, they at least maintained silence throughout the distance between the steps and the inside of the château.
Something like a frown grew on the face of Fitzmaurice, however. There was something about the words of the commandant which gave him an uneasy feeling. His action had been too pointedly connected with Jacqueline's move to prepare her aunt for removal at his own suggestion. Like the others, he followed the Major in silence, none the less, merely slipping his hand under the arm of the girl and walking at her side.
Jacqueline herself was perhaps as little impressed by the unusual move as any one present. Although she was a soldier's daughter, she really knew little of military procedure. The fact of Martout's having asked her to be present at a conference bearing on the course made necessary by the threatening advance of the German forces, did not excite in her mind any particular emotion of surprise. In fact, her most conscious feeling as she entered the room with Fitzmaurice was one of grief that the château was once more in all probability to be abandoned, if only for a time, as Martout had suggested.
The Major waved his companions to chairs and himself remained standing at one end of the table, waiting until all were seated, Jacqueline and Fitzmaurice side by side. He began speaking then without any preamble:
"Gentlemen and mademoiselle: The officers here present know, though perhaps mademoiselle does not, that this château is a point of importance just now in our plans of operation. Also they know that when I was this morning ordered to advance and seize it, I was also told to hold it, and that reenforcements would be sent to enable me to make good my tenure in event of the very thing which now threatens—a return attack by the enemy's forces.
"That those supports have not arrived is in itself patent. I need not explain the position in which we find ourselves as a result. Lieutenant Fitzmaurice's brilliant exploit of the past hour has enabled us to learn of that position, also that our supports are not as yet near enough to come in touch before we will be engaged and in all likelihood driven out with loss. I desire, therefore, to ask your opinion as to the expediency of our action at this time."
He paused and swept the faces of the men ranged about the table. It was an officer of cuirassiers who first made any response.
"Fall back to your supports. When you come in touch, return to a counter attack. That, sir, would be my advice. To remain now would be to throw away men without accomplishing the object desired. A retirement and a later attack might give us permanent possession."
Martout nodded. A faint smile twitched his stern lips briefly.
"Just what, sir, do you mean by a later attack? At night?"
The officer of cuirassiers stiffened.
"I meant later in the sense of future time, sir, but I agree that if possible the night attack would be best—tonight if we can do it. If we retire with little resistance—¦ apparently in a hurry—as though driven completely, we may produce the effect in their minds of something like a complete dispersement. If then we come in contact with our support and return at once—Pfou!" He snapped his fingers and lifted a slight black mustache and his eyebrows in a grimace, seemingly meant merely to point his remarks.
"Excellent," said Martout, and turned to Fitzmaurice. "Lieutenant, just about what was the composition of the advance you observed?"
"A troop of uhlans, sir, the hussars who were here this morning, several full regiments of foot, and some machine-guns; also two batteries of heavier cannon in the first section. So far as I could see there appeared to be other columns farther back, whether coming here or to be diverted to other parts of their line I, of course, can not say."
Martout nodded again.
"Let us suppose they are coming here. If they are given time to entrench and establish themselves, it will take a heavy bit of work to dislodge them. A quick retirement producing the effect suggested, of a dispersement in fact, thereby establishing in their minds a false security, followed by a quick return, is, in my own judgment, the proper course to follow. We are morally sure that our own supports can not be far back. In fact, their delay is an inexplicable thing to us now. Gentlemen, what do you say?"
"Discretion," said a captain, "is the better part of valor, I have heard."
"This is not a question of valor!" snapped Martout shortly. "It's a question of which method will best serve our country. I like not a retirement any better than the next, and God knows we have had enough of them in the past month. Well, gentlemen—well?"
"Retire and attack tonight," said the cuirassier.
The captain who had just spoken nodded.
"I suppose, sir, we have no other choice. Myself, I had rather stay and fight it out if any hope of success presented. But—if we're surely coming back later—"
"We are. Depend upon it," the cuirassier assured him, twitching eyebrows and mustache fiercely. "Nom d'un chien! Do you think we are not? Something's happened that they haven't backed us up, but we'll return—most certainly, mon ami."
Martout's eyes still questioned the others in the room. One by one they either nodded or voiced a reluctant assent.
To Jacqueline, watching, it was evident that each and every one of those grim-faced men-at-arms was yielding to circumstance from a sense of duty rather than any wish or feeling of fear. Her heart swelled as she noted the fact. They were deliberately placing advantage to their army, their nation, ahead of personal chagrin. If they could serve best by falling back and saving their fighting unit, then they must fall back and hope to retrieve the necessity later.
Her heart warmed to them. They were the men of her country. She turned to Fitzmaurice with shining eyes.
"Aren't they splendid?" she whispered. "They don't want to go, but they will do it because it is wisest and gives them a better chance in the future."
He nodded. That strange uneasy feeling was still nagging at him somehow. So far, the senior officer had given no reason, brought forward no point, which could explain the motive for the sparkling girl at his side. Why had Martout said he wished to consult Jacqueline as well as his associates in this matter? Here it was well-nigh decided, and long enough taken in deciding it too, and not one word had been said which could in any way involve her interests, save in so far as retirement would necessitate her leaving the château with her aunt.
The Major had thrown back his shoulders and was speaking again.
"Then I shall order the evacuation for the time. I shall take upon myself the full responsibility for my act. To me was given the order to hold this position. If for what I deem the best end I surrender it without engaging the enemy's forces, on me be, if any, the blame. Once in contact with our reenforcements, we shall return. On that I am determined. Gentlemen, are we agreed?"
They bowed assent, and shoved back their chairs.
It was ended then. Fitzmaurice turned to his companion.
"Go now, and get your aunt ready quickly. I will speak to the Major about it," he directed, and made as if to rise.
Jacqueline's lips took on a pensive droop. Despite her resolve they quivered slightly. Now that it was decided, she found it very, very hard to leave this home of her childhood—to go out from it, knowing that soon it would be given over wholly to the foe of her country, to enter and hold without restraint or hindrance. She nodded without words. She was loathe to attempt speech just at that moment lest it betray her inward feeling.
But even as she laid her hands on the arms of her chair to assist her rising, Martout resumed abruptly:
"One moment more then. We are, it appears, decided that the best we can do is to relinquish our present position and chance an attack in force under cover of darkness. There is a point to be considered in regard to that, and one I foresaw before asking you to this consultation."
Again he paused, while all eyes turned upon him.
Fitzmaurice sank back in his seat. Now he felt it was coming—the real meat of the whole situation which had actuated the Major's actions. He put out a hand and covered one of Jacqueline's, where it lay on the arm of her chair. It seemed to him that Martout appeared reluctant to go on, even after he was sure of an undivided attention. The man stood looking down at the table for several moments before he continued in a wholly different tone:
"In the attack of this morning we shelled this château. For that Lieutenant Fitzmaurice gave us excellent service by his work in marking the range. If we return here tonight it will certainly be necessary to cover our final advance with shell and shrapnel. This being the first lunar quarter, there will be but very scant light. So far as our delivery of the attack is concerned, that is in our favor. But because of it, also, it will be difficult to establish an effective artillery practise, even though we succeed in getting our guns far closer than they were this morning. At the same time there is a feature of the château itself which strikes me in regard to this very condition. It is the position of its two towers."
He turned his gaze from the waiting men to Jacqueline now.
"This morning, as I entered here, Mademoiselle Chinault was good enough, loyal enough, to declare that a house was a small thing to give to one's country. I do not wish to appear to belittle this beautiful and historic structure, but if it were possible for her to remain here—"
"Remain here?" Fitzmaurice interrupted sharply, and lifted himself from his chair.
"Lieutenant, you forget yourself," said Martout. "Resume your seat."
"But—" the Englishman flushed and stammered, between shocked resentment of the thing proposed and the habit of discipline born of his service.
Jacqueline caught at his arm and drew him slowly down. She turned to face Martout.
"Yes, Major," she prompted. "If I were to stay here?"
"If you were to stay here," Martout resumed, "and either you or one of your people could get into the west tower, and on the first sound of our guns fired blindly could show some sort of light or beacon from its top, it would—even though exposed for a very few moments only—establish our range and enable us to cover any temporary trenches they may throw up yet this evening with our shrapnel fire directed to right and left of the light.
"I could, of course, leave a volunteer hidden here for the purpose, but he might be discovered and so bring our design to naught, thereby necessitating our attacking as best we could, and so losing many more men than if we could smother their infantry with our own guns. Besides, if he were found, it would put them on their guard. You, on the other hand, mademoiselle, are known as the rightful resident here, and would be far less liable to be suspected of any such plan."
He had been speaking without meeting her eyes beyond a first glance in her direction. Now he threw up his gray-shot head, so like her own father's, and faced her fully. New feeling crept into his tones more and more.
"I do not ask you to do this thing for me, or mine, or any of us here, mademoiselle. I ask you to do it for France. I appreciate all it may mean to you and yours if detected before we can drive home our attack and reach you. I do not wish you to undertake it blindly or at all, unless of your own volition. But this château—your home—is one of the important points necessary to the success of France's plan of defense. Her foe realizes that. It is for that reason he is pressing back to retake and hold it against her. Hold it he must not. With or without your assistance, cost what it will, it must be retaken. But I know your father. I have seen that in you his spirit persists. If as a soldier's daughter and a woman of your nation—"
"Enough!"
Jacqueline sprang to her feet. She drew herself up to the last inch of her height. All droop was gone from face and figure. Her eyes were bright, shot with the light of a great determination. Her delicate nostrils seemed slightly swollen. Beneath the fabric of her gown her breast rose and fell in deep inhalations.
A subtle force seemed to radiate from her being as she stood in the lessening light in the old home of her youth, among the soldiers of her country—a something which spoke of fire, and spirit, and unquenchable resolve to serve in the fullest measure the traditions of it and her family and nation.
"I shall stay and attempt this thing, Major Martout," she said clearly and distinctly. "I meant all I said this morning. My home, my life, if need be, belong unreservedly to France! If by offering either I can gain her an advantage, or save the lives of those brave men who are fighting her battles, the suggestion is sufficient—there is no need for a request."
"Jacqueline!"
Fitzmaurice reached out and caught her arm, while the others pressed closer about the table, their eyes on the fair countrywoman who so bravely threw herself into the breach. He spoke over her shoulder to the Major:
"Sir—I can do no less than protest this suggestion. As men we can not ask a delicate girl to assume our duties, or expose her to the terrible dangers and penalties of such a task as you propose. I am surprised that—"
Jacqueline's own voice cut clear and sharply through his words:
"Just how large should this signal be, Major Martout?"
She seemed scarcely to feel the hand on her arm, or sense the protest of the man who held her. For the moment she was as one in the grip of some supreme exaltation, so great, so vast, that it raised her above all mundane considerations to a higher plane of existence. To the men crowding forward it appeared as if her spirit, hearing the call of the higher duty to country, had burst all bounds of routine existence and leaped forth in answer.
It was to that spirit Martout spoke:
"As large as possible, of course. But a lantern or a torch on the roof will serve our purpose. We will be watching for it closely."
"You shall find it," said the woman. "I promise you for France." "Amen."
Martout pronounced the word softly, strode from his place and seized her hand, raising it to his lips.
"Gentlemen," he said, as he straightened, "salute a brave woman, and a soldier's daughter."
In the gathering dusk of the room they drew themselves to attention. Their hands rose stiffly in formal salute.
"YOU will retire at once. Get your commands into
immediate marching order," Martout directed. Fitzmaurice
had been standing during the past few moments like one in
a daze. His hand still on the arm of the girl, he remained
breathing deeply, his gaze never leaving that inspired face
of patriotic devotion until after that silent soldiers'
recognition of respect had been given. Now, however, as the
men turned away with a faint clatter of side-arms, he broke
out again in protest:
"Major, this thing is beyond the question. It can not be. The signal is all right. I admit it is important. But—let me do it. I'll volunteer. I'll hide in the tower and light the thing myself. God, man! Do you know what would happen if she were caught—what would happen to—to her?"
"They would search the tower. They did before," said Jacqueline slowly. "I understand the risk—all of it, Major. I—I am not afraid." Her eyes turned toward Fitzmaurice and softened, losing some of their glitter of purpose, taking on a more gentle luster. "You went to destroy the Taube, Maurice, and I waited. It is my duty which calls me now, even as yours called then—my duty to France."
"Then look here, Major," Fitzmaurice suggested, without replying to Jacqueline directly. "Let me stay here with her. Surely she can find some corner to hide me about this old place until the time arrives. Anyway, let me try it. I—"
Martout frowned slightly.
"You might be discovered, all the same, Lieutenant," he returned. "Boy, don't think I don't understand how you feel. I had to drive myself to make the suggestion. But if you stayed here and were found out, you would actually do her harm and prevent the accomplishment of our purpose. Besides, your work has made you of too much value to us to make us want to risk you except in the necessary course of your service."
A slight smile parted Jacqueline's lips. Immediately after she contracted her brows a trifle. One would have said some sudden thought had struck her while Maurice was speaking, the Major replying. Abruptly she nodded her head as if reaching a decision. Once more the fire leaped in her eyes.
"But hang it, man," Fitzmaurice flushed deeply, in almost boyish fashion, "Mademoiselle Chinault and I love each other. Can you understand what this thing means to me now? If you ever loved a woman—really loved her, you—"
"Lieutenant," said the Major. "I have a girl nearly mademoiselle's age in Paris. I loved her mother. Perhaps I understand even better than you just what I have done, in all its bearings. It was a hard thing to bring oneself to ask, as I have just said."
"Then—"
Fitzmaurice leaned forward.
Jacqueline interrupted:
"Make him go with you, Major. I ask it. His danger could do me no good. And, believe me, I do not think I shall be in any great danger. It has come to me while we have been speaking just how I shall accomplish my undertaking. The—the way has been shown."
Martout nodded.
"Lieutenant," he directed, "you will go with my command. That, sir, is an order."
"At least," said the lieutenant, pale now about the lips, "let me remain as long as is safe."
"Very well, sir," the major assented. "I rely upon you to follow us then. Mademoiselle, I bid you au revoir and salute you as a soldier."
He brought up his hand, and, turning, strode to the door.
"What madness," gritted Fitzmaurice as he vanished. "Jacqueline, for God's sake, for our love's sake, give it up while there is time. You can't stay here and run this risk. I can't let you. I love you. I can't go and leave you behind me, knowing what you intend. Sweetheart, for our love and all it will mean, abandon this desperate undertaking before it is too late."
"Maurice," said the girl, "do you remember this afternoon in the tower, and what we spoke of, and how I said I wanted to be worthy of the name I bear, and of all that those vanished ones did, before they could bequeath me my life and my name and its honor?"
"But if you should be detected. It would mean—oh, terrible things, dear heart. You're young and beautiful, Jacqueline. It—it might mean worse things than death itself."
She paled slightly, shaking her head.
"Not that—death would come first, Maurice. But last night Colonel Friedreich said a woman should hold nothing above the interests of her country. I shall profit by his teaching in so far as staying here to serve mine is concerned."
"And nothing I can say—will change you?"
She shook her head.
"Jacqueline!" He seized her almost roughly and lifted her face with one hand. "Kiss me, sweetheart."
She tore away.
"No! Maurice, don't try to make me weaken. I shall need all my courage—all my wits." She paused a moment and went on more calmly. "I know it is hard for you to go. It was hard for me to stay, when you went against the Taube. It isn't that I don't know or don't want to go with you, Maurice. Oh, don't think I've changed in any way—in anything. It's just that this thing I must do for my country—for France. And while you were gone this afternoon I told my aunt all that had happened, Maurice, and she wants to see you. Will you go with me to her now before you have to leave?"
Fitzmaurice drew a breath deep into his lungs.
"Yes. I'll go," he said. "Take me to her." His eyes lighted. "Perhaps she will think differently about this mad hazard you are set on taking."
Jacqueline smiled slowly.
"She is a Chinault," she said simply, and put out her hand for his. "Come."
They passed out of the room to the hall and so down to the kitchen, where Jean and Pierre and Marthe were lunching at the table, and on into Marthe's bedroom, where a candle on a stand threw a circle of light across the bed, and the window-shade was drawn.
"It is I, auntie," Jacqueline announced. "Here is Lieutenant Fitzmaurice—come to see you. My auntie, Maurice."
"Bring a chair and sit down beside me, sir," Madame St. Die directed, and waited until Fitzmaurice had complied. "Take up the candle now, and hold it so that it lights your face distinctly."
In some wonder the man complied with the somewhat unusual request. The woman on the bed studied his features intently. At length she spoke:
"You have a good face. The eyes are not too close, nor yet too far apart. Your nose is good, your jaw strong, and the lobes of your ears not too large for kindness to a woman. Yes—I would venture to say you have good blood. That is as it should be in one who blends it with that of the Chinault. Well, sir, I have heard much about you today. I understand that you love my niece?"
"Love her? I worship her!" Fitzmaurice exclaimed. "That's why all this insane plan drives me to the verge of distraction. How can I go away and leave her? And yet that ass, Martout, orders me to do so at her own request. I could throttle him tor making his suggestion in the first place."
"Just what are you talking about, young man, or do you know?" inquired Madame St. Die almost sharply.
"Good Lord! You don't know, of course!" gasped Fitzmaurice.
In a few words he told her.
"And," said the little lady, "I understand you object?"
"Object? Object to her running any such terrible risk? Can you imagine what would happen if she were detected?"
"My imagination rarely disturbs me greatly. And she must not be detected," said Madame St. Die.
"One can't be sure," persisted the lieutenant. "Knowing that, how can I go away and leave her when I love her as I do?"
The invalid smiled slightly.
"I've raised her from three years, and had some considerable opportunity to grow fond of her myself," she rejoined. "Even so, I would not be the one to wish her to refuse the great issue when it faced her, monsieur. It appears to me that this signal is a very necessary detail. That being the case, it must be lighted. And Jacqueline becomes the best agent for its lighting."
"That isn't the point," Fitzmaurice kept on. "I know it should be lighted. But I offered to stay here and let you folks hide me until the proper time, and then light the thing myself. Why couldn't Martout have accepted that offer instead of exposing Jacqueline to danger? He offered excuses, of course, but not one of them sufficient."
"For instance?" questioned the woman on the bed.
"Nothing of weight," Fitzmaurice plainly evaded.
"He said Maurice would be of greater service elsewhere," Jacqueline explained, interrupting now for the first time.
"A very good reason, it appears to me," said her aunt. "Lieutenant, you should go. I am sure Jacqueline and I shall be enough to see about the signal. Leave our duty to us and attend to your own. That is the part of a good soldier. I quite understand your feelings in regard to all this. They make me think you will be good to my girl when it is all finished, and there is time for making love instead of war. But it is war with which at present we are dealing. Go now and return when you can. I really like your face very much."
Fitzmaurice rose, drew closer, and put out his hand.
"You are a wonderful pair of women," he said frankly. "You make me feel rather callow, and all that, though I've always tried to be a man. And—and—oh, well, I'm going—and I'm coming back—yet tonight."
"Do," accepted the little lady, placing her hand in his. "I really think Jacqueline has exhibited good judgment. We shall be anxious for your return."
Fitzmaurice turned away.
"Will you go with me to the door," he asked Jacqueline softly.
She nodded and slipped before him to the kitchen, and on out into the falling twilight. Already the infantry was making its way off to the hills in the west, winding across the fields where they had charged that morning. The cuirassiers, now in saddle, still seemed waiting for something.
Fitzmaurice turned to her.
"Will you kiss me now?"
She lifted her mouth and he kissed her.
"Good-by," he said thickly. "If I loved you before, I love you a hundred times more right now. There really isn't any one like you, any one so brave, so beautiful, so true. Be careful—oh, Jacqueline dear, be careful. Every minute I'm away is going to be torture till I get back and find you unharmed."
For just a moment the girl faltered before that whispered love. All the desperate purpose and its demands fell from her and left her just a woman who loved. She clung to him a bit too tightly. With both hands she reached up and pulled down his face to hers.
"I will be careful. I will, Maurice, I will," she protested a trifle wildly. "And, oh, Maurice—I love you—love you—but I love France, too—you and her—forever and always. Now go, dear, while I'm strong enough to let you go—Go!"
The cuirassiers were in motion at last. They were riling past. Fitzmaurice turned from her with bowed head and clenched hands. She stood and watched as he strode down through the grass toward the spot where the great Bleriot waited. By and by it chattered sharply. While she watched, it rose up against the sunset and swung like a great wide-winged bat against the western sky. She watched it until it was a dim speck far away—watched it with all her woman's soul in her eyes, then turned back through the kitchen door.
Her aunt's voice reached her, as she entered. She hurried to her, approached the bed, and dropped on its edge. Her eyes questioned the other.
Madame St. Die nodded.
"I like him. He is really a nice boy," she pronounced. "And he really loves you, my child. It was fear for you and nothing else made him speak as he did. I watched him closely. Now forget the man, my girl, and remember only the nation. What is this plan of yours for showing the signal?"
Something of the fire which had shown in the room above, when she pledged herself to the effort, came back into Jacqueline's face. She leaned slightly forward and began speaking swiftly, though softly, while her aunt listened.
"And then I remembered what you said about the old tunnel leading from this room. That was just at the last. And it seemed to me that the way had been shown for me to do what was needed. Does the tunnel lead to the west tower, auntie, and where does it begin?"
"It begins back of my bed, through a piece of the paneling in the wall," said Madame St. Die. "I thought of the possibility of using it myself after your Maurice told me what was forward. Jacqueline, you have developed into quite a woman. I am proud of you, my dear."
"I can slip through the tunnel without any one knowing, light the signal and get back," Jacqueline smiled faintly. "I think it must have been fate made us bring you down here. No one can question my coming to see my sick aunt, and I told Colonel Friedreich you were ill, so that he knows."
"At the same time it will be as well to prepare everything we can before they occupy the château again, and they must be close," said the elder woman. "Send Pierre in to me, my dear. Then go up and receive your German colonel. You might even offer him more entertainment. Be gracious as you may be. Appear to accept the inevitable without question. Leave all save the lighting to Pierre and me. Now go send him in."
Jacqueline obeyed without question, sending the old man from the kitchen, and making her own way up through the house and out to the steps of the courtyard.
Some ribbons of light still lingered over the western hills. Down there she knew the infantry and the cuirassiers were drawing off. Somewhere out there Fitzmaurice rode on his 'plane. She sighed slightly, drooping her shoulders as she turned toward the north and east.
Over there the light from the west still tipped the hills with a last lingering glow. While she stood, there appeared above them the figure of a man and a horse. They came up in dark outline into the fading light. A little pennon fluttered in the breeze of evening from a long staff held in the rider's hand.
He paused as he reached the tip of the hill, and sat sweeping the country below him. He was an uhlan vidette, thrown out in front of his column. The woman who watched, recognized his coming as something expected. She made no move to withdraw into the house, but remained where she was, passively waiting.
THE uhlan rode down slowly from the top of the hill. Behind him came others spaced out. Like the first, they carried long staffs, with the little pennons whipping out from their tips. They too, rode down, and were followed by more.
They began to pour up and over the hill and drop down again in the now falling night, in what seemed an endless succession of men and horses. Like the waves of a human sea, they lapped above the bank of the valley and ran on down its nearer side to cover it with a hostile flood.
As the light lessened, there came a time when Jacqueline could no longer distinguish aught save a darker shadow, which crept over the hills and down. She could not tell when the uhlans left off and the hussars followed. There was naught save the dark mass advancing toward her where she stood and waited its coming.
Now and then a faint glint came from a lance-tip of an uhlan, like the flicker of light from the scale of some prehistoric monster. It came to her in a sort of whimsy, that if she wished to go on with the make-believe she and Fitzmaurice had mentioned that afternoon, she might liken herself to the princess captive in an enchanted castle, with some dreadful creature of fable, some terrible dragon of fiery breath and metal scales, creeping through the darkness against her in horrid folds, which glistened dully as they dragged across the hills.
By and by its approach became an audible something, blended with the pound of hoofs, the clank of accouterments, the creak and groan of wheels, the throb of motors, through the night. They were getting close.
Behind her old Pierre lighted lamps in the hall and withdrew, shuffling down the passage. The light streamed through the open door at her back and across the steps, bathing her figure, throwing it into plain view, when three uhlans lowered their lances and rode in under the gate with sharp, searching glances.
The foremost rode directly toward her and pulled up with a clatter of hoofs. Beside his lance he carried a short carbine, and held a flat German automatic ready in his hand. Under his square-topped helmet he showed a round sunburned face with wide-set eyes. He accosted Jacqueline in broken French.
"Where are the men who held this château today?"
"Gone," she replied in German.
The man seemed relieved at the sound of his native tongue and her answer. He shifted slightly in the saddle.
"Are you speaking truly?" he demanded. "It were best to do so." He waved a hand about the court. "None are hidden in the house or those towers to attempt an ambush?"
Jacqueline shook her head.
"No. If you think so, make a search. But I tell you truly that they all went away. They knew you were too strong. Your people were here before, though not your command. See! If you care to dismount, I will show you what one of them did."
She moved toward the door and pointed.
The uhlan swung down and clanked stiff-legged to her side. She gestured again to the panel where the words chalked that morning had strangely been left undisturbed.
"Your Colonel Friedreich wrote them himself, just before he left here this morning," she explained. "He told me any German would respect them."
The uhlan saluted the words as he might have saluted a person.
"That is true," he declared in a new tone of respect. "So then—there will be no trouble. Them of whom the Herr Colonel writes so, are to fear nothing from any soldier of my people."
He strode back to his horse, mounted and rode back to his companions. They spoke briefly and wheeled out through the gate.
Jacqueline went in slowly through the door, reached the stairs and mounted to her room. Lighting her lamp, she dressed herself quickly for the part she felt she must play, choosing a gown of pure white tissue over an underbody of shell pink. She had decided fully to take her aunt's advice and endeavor to keep the German commander, whoever he might prove to be, as well entertained as she could until the signal of the first French gun. If it were Friedreich himself she would have the advantage of their former meeting to help her, and as Fitzmaurice had reported the hussars with the force he had seen, she felt convinced that the colonel would be with them, especially as he had told her that morning that he would return.
Sounds drifted up to her from time to time as she dressed. They told of the massing of large bodies of men below. A regiment marched by, singing once more their march song, "Deutschland über alles," as they had sung it the night before. Her hands trembled slightly as she fastened the hooks of her gown about her body.
Leaving her room she went down and opened the door of an apartment across the hall from the one where she had entertained Friedreich before. She had brought matches with her, and hastily lighted several ornamental lamps and a large piano-light on a standard, which stood beside a grand piano. Plainly the place was a drawing-room of huge proportions, furnished richly and in excellent taste. Seating herself on a bench before the instrument she dropped her hands on the keys and began to play softly with a well-trained touch.
Now and then she glanced over her shoulder as her fingers ran over the keyboard. She seemed waiting for some one, playing a part thought out, as in reality she was. Through the music she evoked, her ears were strained for the sounds of approach. After what seemed to her tensed nerves a long time, they came.
Heavy boot-heels rang on the stone of the outer steps. There was a jingle of spurs, the clash of a scabbard. A harsh voice spoke and was answered.
Her head bent now somewhat forward, she played on, a louder, more martial strain. And to her ears it seemed that only one pair of feet advanced along the hall and paused at the door. She broke off in the midst of a measure and turned around.
In the doorway the cloaked figure of a man was standing. The lamplight striking upon his helmet in little points of refraction glinted and sparkled. The tentative smile she had first seen the morning before again sat on his thin-lipped mouth.
Jacqueline rose from the bench and stood confronting the newcomer.
He removed his helmet, clicked his heels, and bowed from the waist stiffly.
"Do not permit me to interrupt the music," he admonished. "I but came to inform you of my return, mademoiselle. It was, as you may recall, promised."
Jacqueline smiled by intent.
"And it appears that you are a man of your word, Herr General. I was aware that your forces had returned, but I was uninformed as to whether you had again ventured back in person."
Friedreich threw back the cloak from his shoulders and leaned against the frame of the door.
"General—ventured," he repeated, his smile growing. "Himmel! My incognito is torn into veritable tatters, and my vanity flattered at the same time by your tongue. Myself, however, I am of the opinion that you probably overrate any danger to which I may have been exposed in the first place. As for the present—there is none at all. This time we really occupy the château."
Jacqueline waved a hand to a chair.
"That being the case, will you not occupy a chair also?" she suggested.
He nodded, entered and sat down.
"Go on with the music, mademoiselle," he remarked, throwing one booted leg over the other.
"It is so difficult to play standing," she flashed.
Friedreich threw back his head and laughed.
"Then why stand?"
"One does not sit without permission in the presence of a Feldmarschall." The colonel sobered.
"You really know who I am?" he questioned. Jacqueline bowed.
"As a soldier's daughter I know something of other soldiers, and there are the illustrated papers, Mein Herr von —"
"Stop!" said Friedreich. "Perhaps since my identity is so well known, it is as well that I brought a strong force with me, and have more coming. Sit down, mademoiselle, and answer me some questions, made necessary by your own words. I presume the man in command of the troops who attacked here this morning was equally informed of the fact?"
Jacqueline bit her lips in acute vexation. It was not in her scheme to excite the man's suspicions lest she betray things which might prove fatal to her plans and those of Martout. Furthermore, she was not so positive of his identity as she had assumed to him to be. She gathered her wits quickly before she answered:
"What could you expect? Quite naturally he questioned me about you. I described you as best I could."
"He could scarce be sure from a girl's description," Friedreich said.
"But you signed your initial to what you wrote on our door this morning," she countered swiftly. "It was not an 'F'."
Friedreich shrugged.
"So. My kindness betrays me. Another question, however. Where did your troops go when they left?"
"West," said the girl.
The German chuckled.
"So they would. It has become almost a habit—to go west and south with them. But how far? Did you not hear any talk as to the position of their main body?"
"I heard their major say that they had been disappointed in promised reenforcements, and could not hope to make any effective resistance to your force," said Jacqueline with seeming reluctance. Abruptly she went on more quickly: "Herr Feldmarschall, I am only a girl, and I don't know just what I ought or ought not to say. But I hope you will not lead me into any admissions which might damage the cause of my country."
"I hope not," he responded; "because from to-day, mademoiselle, your country is mine. Though at times we may fall back as we did this morning, for the purpose of gaining strength, at the same time the word 'retreat' has been stricken out of our code-book forever. Our army goes forward, always—or dies; but it does not give up what is taken. The way to be strong is to take and retain what is taken. It is such strength which makes nations great, and weaker nations tremble. Then I understand that this inquisitive French major admitted that his support had failed to materialize?"
"Yes." Jacqueline was plaiting and unplaiting a gauze fold of her dress, looking down, her eyes veiled in what might be indecision.
"But he mentioned no destination—no point on which he was falling back?" Friedreich wrinkled his upper lip and mustache. "He—he spoke of a complete retirement, as being forced upon him," she said shortly, without looking up.
"He used the word 'complete'?"
"Yes. He—he said it was inexplicable to him what had happened."
Friedreich smiled somewhat grimly.
"We could perhaps have given him an explanation," he said in comment. "You have heard our guns all day?"
"Yes."
"That was the major's explanation, had he sensed it. There was fighting elsewhere," Friedreich summed up. "His reenforcements were probably diverted to some other point, where their presence was made more important by us."
In a flash of daring she lifted her eyes and met those of the complacent man in the chair.
"Then—then you do not think they will—come back?" she asked in broken fashion.
Friedreich shifted his position slightly.
"My dear young lady," he replied in patronizing tones, "you make me either speak an untruth or destroy hope altogether. Perhaps it were better to end the suspense at once. I look for their return—never. I suppose just at the moment the idea rather appals, but time will remedy that—that and quiet submission to the stronger power, which in time brings peace."
She made no answer for at least a minute, but sat on, folding and unfolding the cloth in her fingers.
"So my aunt said," she returned at length. "She said I must accept things without question. Still—I hoped—I couldn't quite feel that—that—"
"Your aunt is a wise woman!" Friedreich declared. "I trust she suffered no injury to her condition as a result of the trouble this morning? We will appreciate women like her after we have won peace."
"No." Jacqueline shook her head. "We moved her down to a room below this floor, and she has remained there all day. When I told her your men were returning, she sent me up to receive you, and offer you any entertainment we could provide."
"Dinner—and your presence once more?" Friedreich bowed.
"If you wish it."
"Quarters for my staff and myself while we remain? Last night they made shift, but now—"
"Certainly, General. Had you mentioned it last night—"
"Delightful! I must pay my compliments to your aunt in person tomorrow," said the German. "And I left my staff roosting like fowls on the steps without. If they might come here while we wait the summons to dinner?"
"Of course. Shall I call them?" Jacqueline rose.
"No. I'll do that myself." Friedreich rose also.
"Then I shall go see about the dinner," Jacqueline suggested.
"And after dinner you will play for us? You have a good touch."
"I will try, if you wish it. I fear I shall be nervous, however."
Friedreich gave her a glance. She fancied he frowned for not more than an instant. Yet it was as if in that space he asked himself a question concerning this woman with whom he conversed.
"Not you," he said shortly, and drew back to allow her to pass through the door. "By the way, where are my hostages, mademoiselle?"
"Waiting in the kitchen," she informed him promptly. "Will you want them at once?"
Friedreich grinned. "No," he decided, and added: "There is small use in our antagonizing one another any longer, mademoiselle. Let there be a truce between us while I am here. Treat me as a guest. I and mine will treat you as our hostess. I have small desire to bring any major sorrow or trouble on you or yours."
Jacqueline inclined her head in assent as she once more turned away. She was undecided in her own mind just how to consider the first re-encounter in net results. There could be small doubt that the man was suspicious. Had her compliance been too ready? Was that why he had given her that frowning glance of appraisement? Had she added to his suspicions? Yet his last words, his refusal to place Jean and Pierre again under restraint could indicate only a desire upon his part to make her position easy, as he had said.
As she made her way below-stairs, she allowed herself to hope that her seeming reluctance in answering his questions had, as she intended at the time, encouraged him to belief in all she had said, and so added to that impression of reluctant but complete surrender of the château, which Martout had desired. If so, then full play would be given to the overweaning confidence of the man in the security of his own tenure, and the likelihood of the planned attack reduced to a minimum in his mind.
She went down and sent Marthe and Pierre scurrying about in preparation for the promised dinner, which must be served within the shortest possible time. Then she went on to the room behind the kitchen and softly closed the door before narrating what had occurred to Madame St. Die.
"Everything is ready here," that lady declared. "Pierre has placed all which will be needed inside the passage. Also he has gone through to the far end and loosened the trap door in the floor of the tower, lest in the end it should have defied your strength, after remaining closed for years. In fact, I had him do that even before anything else, as it was most essential. He had barely time to slip the other things into the tunnel before these people arrived.
"I have had my bed drawn down slightly, as you can see, that you may slip behind it to open the panel. So far you have done well. Maintain now the impression. Continue to appear submissive, and allow the native vanity of the man to nourish his own conceit to the end. When that end comes, be careful. Your manner should show consternation if what you expect occurs in his presence. Go now. Let yourself be seen. You should not remain out of sight over long." She smiled with thin lips. "It should go hard if two women can not outwit one general—for the sake of their country. Go, Jacqueline. Leave the dinner directions to me. Go up and arrange the table."
Jacqueline bent to kiss her before she left the room.
"I shall try to play my part as I should," she said simply. "So much depends upon it, that I must—and yet—that very thing makes me a little afraid."
"So long as the man doesn't know the cause, the attitude of a little fear will not displease his sort," observed her aunt. "It is something to which he has been accustomed. Run along now and amuse him. He will then think less about other things. Leave the door open that I may talk to Marthe."
A SOUND of singing reached Jacqueline's ears as she
mounted to the floor above. A burst of men's voices and the
sound of the piano came from drawing-room door.
She walked boldly down the hall and paused to look inside. Friedreich had removed his cloak, which lay across a chair, and had seated himself on the bench in front of the keyboard. His staff stood clustered about him, while he played with a firm assurance. As she reached the door, he crashed out several sonorous chords, and the voices again took up the song.
"Strong and true is the watch on the Rhine!" came the words to her ears, well sung by voices of cultured control, and in perfect key. In the middle of the verse, however, Friedreich broke off and swung himself about to face her.
"Ah, mademoiselle!" he exclaimed. "Music hath charms to soothe the hungry beast. Is dinner ready?"
Jacqueline smiled appreciation of his paraphrase and shook her head slightly.
"Not yet, Herr Colonel. I but came up to arrange the table, and so heard the singing."
"Then," said Friedreich, "I suppose I must play some more. Gentlemen—again."
He turned and struck the keys sharply.
"Strong and true is the watch on the Rhine," they sang, as the girl drew back across the hall to prepare the great table in the opposite room for their meal. It followed her even after she had shut the dining-room door against it. "Strong and true."
She drew a deep breath. She, too, was keeping a watch—a lone woman in the midst of these strong men, who assailed her home and nation. It must be a true watch, strong in spirit, if not in physical strength—strong in purpose, no matter what might come—so strong that no subtlety of words or manner or action could betray it and drag it out or make it known—so true that it would not waver or shrink until that light blazed from the tower to give her nation the range.
She lifted her arms and stretched them out toward the west. Her eyes widened and darkened. A few hours, at most, would compass the time of her watch—and then she would show the signal. And the great idea which had come to her when she stood with Maurice and the Major again caught her up and swept her to the heights of supreme resolve. All doubt of self fell from her for the moment, and left her thrilling with naught save her patriotic devotion and the things she was to do. As large a signal as possible, the Major had said. It should be large, unmistakable, glowing—as glowing as the inspired fire which had waked its conception in her soul.
The music from across the hall changed its tempo and swung into a newer measure. Faint and muffled, sung in deep voices, it came to her, bringing as on the night before its heavy menace.
"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," they roared in full-throated acclaim, rolling the words out in strong Teutonic accents, voicing the thing for which they had labored and planned, and were now seeking to compass with the most perfect engine of conflict the world had ever seen, of which that dark, sinuous monster of armed force which had crept down across the hills in the gathering night had been but one infinitesimal feeler—a tentacle of the central brain, thrown out to grip and hold and strangle all resistance.
In a sudden passion of resentment the girl clenched her hands.
"No!" she whispered harshly. "No! Might may conquer for a time, but in the end, Right must triumph. In the end heart and soul and faith must gain against deliberate planning. Somewhere—oh, somewhere the plan must break and throw out the whole fabric of their planning. It's—it's too dreadful, this mathematical precision—this awful certainty of result. It's inhuman. They seem to even deny any human equation. They aren't an army of human beings, they are just—just a war-making machine. Somewhere the machine must break, and, once broken, the whole engine—"
She checked her utterance abruptly. She realized that she must not give way to this seething emotion if she were to maintain her poise and do her share toward that hoped-for breaking. She turned to arrange the table.
All that she possessed which was fine, fitted to grace the board of a banquet, she dragged out and used to deck the board where her enemies would sit. She spared nothing, as she worked to the final result of producing a table which would charm the senses by its completeness and richness of appointment. Shutting her ears to the voices from beyond the closed door, she persevered until all was finished, then set the door wide and went down to the kitchen to see how nearly the meal itself might be ready.
She found Marthe in reality waiting for her summons, and directed her to begin serving with Pierre's help, at once. She drew a deep breath as she again climbed the stairs. The hardest part of her task lay still before her—the waiting, the keeping up of a pose, while all the time her soul would be listening for that signal shot out of the night.
What would come after that would be swift, desperate action, with little time for any introspective consideration. But the interval—that was the thing to try her powers of control. She leaned for a moment against the door at the top of the stairs, bowing her head against it to gain a final courage for what was to come.
"God," she breathed in well-nigh inaudible accents, "help me. Make my watch strong and true."
She pushed the door open. They had stopped singing. Outwardly calm, but inwardly seething with her emotions, she approached the drawing-room door and paused on the threshold.
"Herr Colonel," she announced, "such refreshment as I could prepare on short notice awaits your pleasure."
Friedreich rose.
"Gentlemen, attend." He advanced toward her as she drew back, reached her side and offered his arm. "One may escort one's hostess," he said smiling, as he led her to a chair and took the place beside it.
As on the night before he filled her glass and his own.
"Gentlemen," he cried again. "I give you his Majesty, William II."
"Hoch!" they replied in chorus, lifting their glasses. "Hoch der Kaiser, hoch!"
They drank.
Jacqueline lifted her glass and turned to the man beside her.
"You make for your hostess a difficult position," she said. Her glass fell to the floor.
Friedreich flushed darkly.
"I am rebuked," he returned as he drew out her chair and went on in louder accents: "And once more, meine Herren, I give you our hostess, fit in beauty to grace any presence, as now by her presence she graces our meal."
Turning to her directly, he lifted his glass and drank. Jacqueline smiled rather wanly.
"You make me feel almost as though you intend using me to grace your triumph," she said as she sank to her seat.
"The history which would then record your features would bid fair thereby to excuse the offense, and the very human weakness which inspired it," he made answer. "But these are not the days of Caesar. We no longer lead our captives in chains through streets lined with banners and paved with roses."
Mademoiselle Chinault's eyes snapped.
"Rather you haul them in stock cars bedded with straw, I understand."
Friedreich shrugged.
"Gott! Your tongue still holds its sting! Necessity, mademoiselle. The supply of bed-wagons is limited even on the better railways."
"And," she countered, "I am surprised to hear you speak of human weakness, after our conversation of last night."
"I was speaking," said Friedreich, "of the personal equation. In the fighting machine, we have eliminated the human element mainly—as also the humane. The great man at the head of our general staff—our 'Big Chief,' as we call him, has long ago ruled upon that point. Our military units have been organized and placed with the same precision that a finished player of chess handles his pieces. Every move necessary in any possible contingency has been considered and decided upon for years. No man on our staff could win to such a position until he had proven himself able at solving such problems.
"Any possible war which could come upon us has been fought and won in the Königsplatz office long ago, and each and every move, each and every disposition of forces, each and every need and requirement, predetermined and provided against. It is that which gives us our celerity of action, our surety of result. War having been thrust upon us, we accept the challenge, and begin merely the putting into effect of those movements which we have already assured ourselves will and must result in the final triumph. It is so that we have eliminated the human element in an almost complete degree.
"And in order to use the machine, composed of men, in the most effective manner, we must use them wherever their unit will do the best work, regardless of cost or loss of life, or any other consideration save the producing of the already planned effect, just as the chess-player again sacrifices a pawn or a piece without compunction, if thereby he can gain an advantage. Yet to use men so, one must abandon all humane considerations and standards. And so far as the enemy is regarded, humanity in the concrete sense has no place in war.
"Our own Big Chief has laid down the rule that the end of an army should be the total destruction of the enemy. Therefore, the harder the thrust we deliver, the greater the loss we inflict, the sooner will the prearranged and inevitable victory be produced. And yet no army ever took the field in a more prepared state than ours. Every essential detail has been foreseen and received full attention; not for the good of the soldier, but for the good of the nation and his ability to serve.
"For instance, where your soldier has six buttons on his trousers, ours has twelve. Why? For two reasons. First, as the position of the suspenders grows irksome, he can shift buttons and the angle of strain. Second, if in battle any should be lost, he still has a reserve. We have gone so far as that. And always our kitchens provide hot coffee for our men on the march, because its heat and contained caffeine stimulate and relieve muscular tire, enabling our men to march farther and arrive fresher at that point where their weight is needed."
It was appalling. As he ran on and on, citing innumerable details of the way in which his nation made war, on a scientific basis, Jacqueline lapsed into the role of listener merely. She was glad she need not speak. The cold, impersonal presentation of fact, seemed forcing her slowly down into a spiritual depression.
Some of the complete confidence of the man struck against her hope, battering upon it as his words struck upon her brain. There was something compelling, even to her, in this orderly marshaling of already proven facts—something full of deadly threat, which chilled her with a vague premonition, amounting almost to terror, lest the thing he alleged were about to happen.
A clock on the mantel above the great fireplace struck eleven. It seemed to her that her heart paused and waited between the slow strokes for the sound of that gun which would cry to her the appeal of her nation, hard pressed already by the vast machine which had been built up for her country's undoing. Yet the last stroke died, and she sat on, listening, listening to the man at her side, listening in vain for the gun.
Other guns growled as they had all day and all the day before—the guns of the mighty system of which Friedreich spoke. They made a fitting accompaniment for his words. A sort of sick despair began to lay hold upon her, a feeling as of being caught and held by some invincible, unescapable force, which would presently crush utterly down upon her, and pass on unmindful as to whether she lived or died, blindly insensate to anything save its final purpose of meeting and overcoming all which stood in its way.
"It comes down to preparedness in the end," Friedreich was summing up. "Take the incidents here alone, of the last two days, for example. Your people should have held this château in falling back, rather than have gone beyond it. Would our strategy have overlooked that? No. Months before we would have planned to hold it, and it would have been held. Yesterday we took it without resistance. Today your people wasted men in driving us out. The fact that they wanted it proved it of importance. We retired for the time, and came back with force to hold it. And we found them unsupported throughout an entire day. That was a second blunder, which we would never have made.
"The net result, then, is what? We have developed an evidence of weakness on their part to themselves, wrested from them what they now know they should have held, and established against them the moral effect of even this minor reverse. In the end the total weight of such moral effects is extremely depressing on an army. Its result is far more serious, indeed, than the loss of many men.
"Soldiers expect to lose their comrades, but not battles. If they lose men, they fight the better to inflict an equal or greater loss on the enemy. If they lose battles, they fight less well, because they are discouraged, and come to doubt their generals and themselves. That is another reason why we always win, at no matter what cost, mademoiselle. The army which is not beaten, is the army which, no matter what its loss in killed and wounded, will win in the end, which always arrives where the master mind of the Big Chief directs it to be at a certain time as surely as though it were a chess piece held in his hand."
Jacqueline put out a hand and raised her wine to her lips. A nervous tremor shook her. She felt that unless she did something her teeth would begin to chatter in another moment. She was cold, chilled through and through with an inward cold. This strain of waiting was becoming more than she could endure.
"Why—why?" she questioned. "Was this man right? Had her countrymen failed again? Why was the signal for which she waited, hoped, prayed—to which she was prepared to sacrifice her all, if need be—to answer which she had dared so much—not given?"
She set the glass to her lips, fully aware that Friedreich's eyes were upon her. She would sip a little of the wine, and then—then she must make some sort of answer.
She put down her glass slowly and turned to face her companion. After all, there was but one thing to do—go on playing her part, fostering this confidence of his.
"It's—it's rather dreadful all the same, to hear you talk about it," she said slowly. "You—you see I belong to the other side, Herr General."
Friedreich nodded.
"Pardon," he returned, seemingly arrested by her pallor which had grown during his words. "My own enthusiasm has carried me beyond considerate limits, I fear. You appear fatigued, mademoiselle, and it is late. We will forego the music this evening. If you will arrange for the quartering of myself and my men—"
"Your room of last night was satisfactory?" she asked.
"Perfectly, yes."
"Take it for tonight, then. You can use any or all of the rooms on that floor or this," Jacqueline told him. "Myself, I shall spend the night with my aunt, below. I shall instruct the woman who showed you your quarters last night to see that all is prepared. Ask her for what you wish. She will obey."
"Excellent," Friedreich accepted. "Perhaps now you will wish to retire?"
She bowed. Her heart was suddenly leaping. At least his consideration, though late, was making her exit easy. If now the signal should sound she could answer at once. The fancy came to her that the very element of human equation which the man denied was now playing into her hands.
Friedreich rose and drew out her chair. She gained her feet.
"Gentlemen," he announced, "our hostess is leaving."
They rose and bowed in silence. On his commander's sign, his aide, Munster, left his place and opened the door. Controlling herself, Jacqueline bowed to Friedreich and the others.
And then—then she was out in the hall, making her way to the door and down the stairs, to speak briefly to Marthe, and go on into her aunt's room and sink on the side of the bed, her hands locked between her knees, her body bent from the hips, her eyes hot and tired, staring straight before her, unmindful of any external object, her ears straining for the sharp call to duty, which did not come.
Her aunt neither spoke nor moved. She lay silent, watching her niece and waiting.
After a bit Jacqueline turned her head. "They—they haven't fired it—the gun," she said in a voice akin to despair.
"PATIENCE," said the woman on the bed. "I have been thinking. Are they fools to come up while the whole place hums like a hive? You have been busy with your part, my child, while I have had nothing to do. Jean Giroux has been eyes and ears for me. He has crept out and come back and told me what was forward.
"This time they are expecting to hold the château. Their infantry is digging trenches by lantern, and in the court they have put up trestles for their men to stand on and shoot over the walls. They have brought up many guns and placed them to good advantage. Their cavalry lies on both flanks, in support of the rest.
"Would your Martout be apt to attempt a surprise on a position awake, alive, preparing to receive him? Your father has told me better than that. Armies are not surprised before midnight so well as between then and dawn, when they are mostly asleep, at their lowest physical ebb, exhausted by their efforts of the day before. Wait, then."
Some of the strained tension went out of the girl's face.
"I am foolish," she murmured. "I have been waiting—growing more and more hopeless all the time, without thinking far enough to realize the reason." She smiled slightly. "I—I am very young, auntie, am I not?" She rose. "Tell me how to open the panel, that I may make no mistake when the time does come then."
Madame St. Die nodded.
"Step behind my bed."
Jacqueline slipped in between the wall and the high head of the old-fashioned four-poster in which her aunt was lying.
"Now," said the voice from behind her as she stood, "count ten of the wainscoting-strips from the side wall. Have you done that?"
"Yes." There was a quiver of excitement in Jacqueline's tones. To whom does not the hidden way appeal in subtle fashion?
"Look down now," her aunt went on. "Count to the third board in the floor beyond the tenth strip. Press down upon it with your foot next the wall. Hook your fingers into the crack between the strip and the next, and pull it toward the side."
Jacqueline obeyed. Very slowly a narrow rectangle grew before her. Breathing more quickly she increased her hold on the edge of the strip as the narrow crack opened. The panel slid quite into the side wall and showed her the black throat of the passage. A faint musty odor rushed out to meet her—the odor of long-imprisoned air shut away, from the sunlight.
"Have you done it?" questioned Madame St. Die.
Jacqueline came back from the spell the mystery of this old, old tunnel had thrown about her.
"Yes," she responded.
"Then leave it open and come back and wait."
Jacqueline emerged from back of the bed and crossed to close the door into the kitchen. In her first hurried entrance she had left it open and forgotten it since. Her aunt stayed her.
"Leave the door as it is," she directed. "Some time ago a man was here and commanded that it should not be closed, and also that lights be kept both in here and in the kitchen."
"But—"
Jacqueline's lips contracted. She turned slowly to face the speaker. Madame St. Die smiled slightly.
"My bed is fortunately placed. Also it is as well I had Marthe draw the shade, early this evening. He did not require that it be raised. Sit down, child. You gain nothing by tiring yourself out by needless pacing."
Jacqueline dropped into a chair. She knit her brows and sat staring at the flicker of the candle. So their espionage extended even to this! Oh, they were thorough! Not even the door of sickness might be closed against them. She shivered quite unexpectedly to herself and sat on.
Midnight struck from a clock in the kitchen and brought with it a soft pad of feet. Jean Giroux slid in and paused by the foot of the bed. His face was thin, shrewd, intense, lighted with the big things of childhood. Very gravely he gave the military salute.
"Things grow quiet, madame," he made report stiffly. "The Germans are rolling themselves in their blankets at last. Save only a few, they seek sleep."
He dropped his hand and turned to the girl.
"I have been the Boy Scout for madame," he explained. "I have gone about. Me, I am but a boy who was yesterday shut up. They do not mind me. Just now one of them said it was time little boys should be tucked up in bed asleep—and he grinned at me, when he said it." He leaned over the foot of the bed on his chest, to raise and kick his bare feet. "Little boy!" he sniffed. "I am a scout."
"Then," said the invalid quickly, "go once more and see if any one is near the door to the kitchen."
He went and returned, shaking his head, his face expectant.
"As I told you, I have been thinking while you were up-stairs," Madame St. Die went on, addressing her niece. "Pierre, at the first mention of what you proposed, set the cans inside the passage by my order. It were better, however, that when the time comes they were at the other end, rather than this. You can save minutes if you have less far to take them, as they are heavy. Suppose now that you light another candle and carry them through to the other end, my child."
Jacqueline roused, picked up one of the several candles lying on the table where the lighted one was burning and ignited its wick. Madame St. Die produced a holder from beneath her pillow. The girl could not but admire how fully her father's sister had thought out and provided for each step which must be taken in what they meant to do.
Taking the candle in her hand, she once more slipped in between the bed and the wall.
"Go with her," her aunt directed Jean Giroux.
The boy pressed at Jacqueline's heels, his face shining at the new adventure. Together they bent and passed through the panel and straightened beyond it, to find the cans of oil Pierre had placed there, sitting almost at their feet.
Giving Jean one, Jacqueline lifted the other. They went forward down the passage. The cans were heavy. Jacqueline was glad the boy was with her to divide the burden, and doubly glad her aunt had thought of thus halving the effort of the final moment. To have carried both cans and the candle, she now saw would have been well-nigh beyond her powers, and to have threaded the passage, of which she had never even heard before that morning, without a light of some sort, would have meant almost fatal delay.
The little woman with her quick brain, was fit sister for a soldier, thought the girl as she plodded forward in the uncertain light of her candle which flickered and flared as she went. In a way this journey was in its minor degree equivalent to that preparedness of which Friedreich had spoken.
The hardness and cold of uneven stone flagging struck through the thin soles of her shoes to her feet. A curiosity to behold this unknown part of her people's house for generations laid hold upon her.
When her arm grew tired from the weight of the can, she set it down and lifted the candle higher above her head. Its faint illumination struck up to an arched roof, and out to side walls of roughly hewn stone, now covered with the dust of years and the webs of dark-loving spiders, and streaked here and there with moisture, splotched with mold.
When it had been built, she did not know, but it came to her that its age must date from that of the now inhabited part of the château, constructed long after the old towers and keep, in a more easy and less warlike past, yet at a time when it were well to have an easy means of reaching the real fortress of the place without undue exposure.
It was a new thing added to the interest of her home. If she were quiet, and should sit down here, what vague pictures of the past could her soul gather from its black-shrouded length? Had it rung to the sound of armored feet, swarmed with the strength of the defenders of the towers, rushing hastily to stations? Once she knew, from her aunt's own words, it had harbored and sheltered a company of women, drawn together by the grim terrors of a former war against the same foe which now once more possessed it.
What an odd thing history was—the history of persons and things! The days went by and brought this and that, and all the time each was leading up to some major event, although none suspected the fact in the petty interests of each day itself. Yet that was why she stood here with the can of oil at her feet and the candle in her hand, and Jean sitting upon his can a few feet away.
Since the day before, everything had led up to this moment, as this was leading to the great moment when she should light the promised signal to the guns of France—should fire a beacon to show the path of attack, which should once more make Château Chinault a point held by her nation.
There was Fitzmaurice coming—even in the darkness she flushed now at the thought—there were the words spoken by him, not recognized in their true bearing at the moment, yet which had planted the idea for her plan in her mind. There was Martout's appeal to her for France, and her conception of how to answer, based on her aunt's newly announced existence of the tunnel. There was even her aunt's presence in the very room from which the tunnel opened, her very bed acting as the screen against hostile eyes. Each and every event had but really led up to and prepared for the making of another item in the history of her house, her nation, her own life.
She lowered the candle and stooped to again take up the can of oil. Jean rose and followed as she once more went down the dark bore beneath the courtyard, where the feet of the enemy trod overhead.
After a considerable distance, as it seemed, walking in that half illumination, they came to the foot of a flight of stone steps, leading up to what appeared a square block of stone. Jacqueline mounted part way to examine it closely. Studying its position, she became aware that it was really no more than one of the flags in the floor of the tower. She could see where Pierre, in loosening it hours before, had broken down scales from the grime of years since it had last been raised.
Returning to the bottom of the steps, she took Jean's can and placed it with her own beside the lower tread of the stairs. When the great moment came for her service, she could seize upon them there and carry them up without delay.
She was turning to retrace her steps when Jean himself plucked at her sleeve and brought her to a pause.
He was looking up into her face, as she lowered hers at his touch. His hand still lay on the arm whose hand held the candle. It was thin and soiled. His face, tilted back, was that of a child, but glowing, with partly open lips.
"Mademoiselle," he stammered in the haste of his daring, "when you come back, let me come again with you. I am strong. I carried my can all the way, as you saw. I can carry it up in the tower. Madame has told me what you intend. She has spoken of great things to me this evening—of what it is to serve one's country, and what sort of men are the best for a nation, and of how great a country our country has been, and how great she may yet become if everybody works to that end. Mademoiselle, let me come with you when the gun is fired. I, too, would serve my country, if only by carrying a can up some stairs."
Eagerness thrilled in his words—the eagerness of the great adventure, and something more—the budding of that flower of patriotism which makes the doing of service the true man's greatest honor, ennobles the humblest task so it be done for the good of the land he loves, exalts the dull clay left after the shock of battle to be in that brief instant the shape of a hero, unsuspected until the supreme call was heard.
It reached the heart of the girl, waking a kindred of feeling between herself and the child. Yet there was danger. If they should be detected in this attempt it would mean death for the boy, worse for herself perhaps. And yet, was it after all but another step in the leading up to the final act? The cans were heavy. Was this help vouched her in her endeavor by some force stronger than herself—the thing men called fate?
"There is danger in the undertaking, Jean," she said gently.
He dropped his hand from her arm, but his eyes still held on her face.
"My father fights for France," he returned with a little note of hurt pride in his voice. "Is my father afraid?"
"He is a man," Jacqueline responded. "Thou art a child."
"He is my father," said Jean. "I am a Giroux."
Something like a sob rose up in Jacqueline's throat. She bent and caught the hand of the boy in hers.
"Yes, that you are, mon Jean" she made both resolve and answer. "Thou shalt come with me then if you wish it. Now let us return to madame."
They went back through the tunnel—still waiting to serve its purpose, too, after so many silent years, even as they now waited to serve—back to where the faint glow of the candle beside Madame St. Die's bed made a pale streak out of the panel in the wall, so that Jacqueline blew out her own light and went on, still holding the soiled hand of the boy.
Her aunt's eyes questioned as she came out into view. She nodded.
"All is ready," she said.
"No one approached," said madame. "It remains then but to wait. Sit you down, child. Waiting is women's work. How many are waiting tonight, do you suppose? Waiting and watching, hoping and praying, in a thousand, thousand homes, east and west, north and south—just women—just waiting—for what? For the news which shall make their hearts beat again for a while, or crush hope quite out. Men paint great pictures of other men locked in the grapple of death, and call them portrayals of war. They ought to paint just the picture of a woman with the torture of hell in her eyes. Then—then they would have what they sought—the real cruelty of war, the real tragedy of it behind it. Sit you down and wait then—play the woman's part."
"Don't," said the girl thickly. "Oh, don't! Maurice is out there somewhere." She flung her hand toward the west. "I've been trying—not to think!"
"Dieu'" cried Madame St. Die. "I am an old fool. Ma petite, forgive my loose old tongue. I had forgotten for the moment. Fear not, dear girl, he is safe, at least for tonight."
Jacqueline shook her head.
"How safe? Did he not say he would come back?"
"So he did—so he did," her aunt grudged assent. "He would, of course, with you here. It is so hard to wait when one is young. I remember that, too, now."
JACQUELINE sat down on a chair drawn close to the
stand with its candle. She laid her hands limply in her
lap. Her breast heaved in a long-drawn, quivering sigh. Her
eyes turned as by instinct toward the west. But she made no
answer.
Jean squatted on another chair, wide-eyed, shifting now and then with the restlessness of childhood. The night had at length grown quiet. Even the far guns grumbled but seldom, like dogs which growl in their sleep and fall silent again.
One o'clock struck. Marthe came down the stairs from above. She brought a blanket and pillow with her and said briefly that they had sent her below, keeping Pierre to open wine, of which they were drinking a great deal; smoking and singing their songs, and they had broken some glasses. She wrapped the blanket about her, laid the pillow on the floor close by the kitchen stove and stretched herself out, to fall into a heavy sleep in which now and then she breathed harshly, gurgling in her throat and seeming about to choke.
Jacqueline sat on. Jean had begun to nod on his chair. After a time he slid off and curled himself up in a corner with his head on an arm, very much, as it seemed to the girl keeping vigil, like a tired little puppy. Her aunt did not speak.
Now and then Jacqueline fancied she, too, dozed, for from time to time she started and stared at her niece with eyes which shone bright in the light of the candle, from between her lids, and turned a bit and lay quiet again.
At half-past one, Pierre crept down the stairs. Some of the men still drank and others had gone into rooms and to bed. Friedreich was among the latter. The others had told him he might get some sleep if he wished.
Name of a pipe, but those men could drink! Mumbling and mouthing, he drew a chair up to the kitchen table, seated himself, folded his arms as a rest and laid his head upon them. After a time he, too, seemed to fall into sodden slumber.
Jacqueline began to count the slow drag of the minutes. What was occurring outside beneath the veil of darkness? Had Martout come up with his laggard supports? Were they coming back, creeping up, creeping up into position for the swift attack, while she sat here beside the guttering candle, waiting to keep her pledge? Or had they already arrived at the point desired? Were they lying down there somewhere, waiting like herself for the hour to strike before they essayed the venture? And if so, why did they wait longer? Surely all vigilance was as fully relaxed now as it would be. And was Fitzmaurice with them? Was he lying out there somewhere in the night, thinking of her as she was thinking of him—impatient of the delay which kept them one from another?
She shifted her position. The chill of the September night between midnight and dawn had crept into the room through the open doors.
Her aunt moved.
"What?" she murmured, half roused from slumber. "What did you say?"
"Nothing," said the girl. "Go back to sleep, auntie."
"I was not sleeping," denied her elder with mild indignation, and belied herself the moment after by falling back into her doze.
Somewhere a cricket began shrilling through the night, its strident voice filling the room, to the girl's strained ears. By and by, it seemed to her that she fitted words to its piping: "Strong and true—strong and true." They were the words of the song Friedreich and his men had sung. "Strong and true is the watch on the Rhine."
She too was keeping a vigil. She had prayed out there on the stairs that it might be strong and true—her watch on the Marne. But it was a long, long vigil. She felt tired, utterly weary, and the chill of the night was creeping into her body and limbs.
Where was Fitzmaurice? How strong and brave and clever he was! How daringly he had overcome the Taube. Her heart filled with pride as she recalled the struggle. And what a boy he was with it all; what a big boy, what a dear boy! Up there in the tower—Ah, the tower! She could see him yet, brandishing the broken spindle of the chair. And then—then he was on his knee before her, and a boy no longer, but a man—the man—dragging her soul up to confession by his appeal. Where was he now? The Bleriot had looked like a great bat against the sunset.
One—two! The clock struck with a whirring jar in the kitchen.
CRASH!
Sharp, clear, reverberant, the sound of a single field-gun rent the darkness with its imperative demand. It struck upon the ears of the watcher, seeming to fill all the vast reaches of her world and blot out all—everything else.
Jacqueline sprang to her feet. In the kitchen, Marthe started up screaming. Little Jean uncoiled from his puppylike huddle and scrambled to his feet. On the bed, the dozing woman opened her eyes and half raised herself on an arm. Her eyes fell on Jacqueline already thrusting the wick of her candle into the flame of the other.
"Go!" she cried, lifting an arm and pointing. "Light the path of France!"
Light the path of France! The great moment at last! The wick caught. It flamed. Her breath coming in short, catching inhalations, her bosom panting, her eyes alight with the fire of her purpose, Jacqueline lifted her candle and turned to reach the panel back of the bed.
With Jean behind her, wide-eyed, trailing, she slipped through it and rose, running down the stone-paved floor, stumbling over its uneven surface in her haste, catching herself and her breath in little gasps and running on, on, down the never-ending reaches toward the steps and the cans.
To light the path of France! Her mind was full of the thought of service. France, her homeland, was calling through the night—calling for a light to point her way. The long vigil was ended with its waiting, its hope deferred. Now must follow swift action to prove that the watch she had kept had been strong and true to the end.
Behind her she heard Jean breathing shortly, the patter of his bare feet over the stones. Brave little ally who had volunteered to help her!
Was the tunnel never ending? Surely she had not come so far when she carried the cans here before. Was there some side passage, and had she made a wrong turning? The thought chilled.
Then—then—no! The flickering, whipping flame of her candle showed faintly the steps and the cans beside them. She seized one and began to stagger upward with it toward the great flag in the floor of the tower, which blocked her further way.
When it was just over her head, she put down her candle.
"Jean," she called softly.
"Here, mademoiselle," he answered from the step below.
"I shall put out the candle and raise the stone," she gasped shortly, and blew out the flame.
Darkness, thick, impenetrable fell, upon them. Jacqueline raised her arms and pushed on the stone square. It yielded slightly. She forced herself upon a higher step and pushed until her young back bent under the lifting effort.
The stone rose slowly, up and up, until she could straighten, holding it tilted on edge above her. Still forcing it back, she rose another step, while she raged at its stubborn bulk. Without warning it slipped quite from her grasp and fell over with a dull, crunching crash which brought her heart into her throat in quick apprehension.
A shrill metallic clangor was filling the night—a bugle waking the sleeping men in the trenches and the courtyard. So brief had been that interminable time then in the tunnel.
Jacqueline caught her breath deep and full into her lungs. Its shrill voice had drowned the sound of the stone's fall to sleep-dulled ears. The way was open!
She drew back and caught up the can she had been forced to relinquish when lifting the stone out of the way. Holding it to her breast, she crawled up out of the square hole and gained her feet.
"Be careful," she hissed to Jean. "Don't let your can strike. Here—hand it up to me."
She found it thrust to her and set it to one side. The boy came up quickly behind it. She guided his hand back to the can.
"Take hold of my skirt and follow," she whispered, and turned to the tower stairs.
At last she trod familiar ground. Too many times as child, and maid, and woman, had she mounted here to lose her way or hesitate now in her going. She found the first step almost by instinct and began mounting, still carrying the can of oil hugged tight against her breast.
Up and up, 'round and 'round. Never had the way seemed so long in all her recollection. France was calling—calling. Did they think she would never heed the summons? And the bugle below was calling, too, calling to those who were enemies to France—calling them up to take arms against her.
Up and up, up and up. Her breath began to grow labored under her effort. Her limbs ached with the hurried mounting. The can in her arms grew more and more heavy.
"Mademoiselle," panted Jean's voice. "Mademoiselle—I—I can't. It is—too heavy—mademoiselle."
"You must," she whispered back hoarsely. "Jean, you must—for France."
"Oui."
His voice was a whimper, but his hand still dragged at her skirt, telling that he followed.
Her heart was pounding. Her throat ached and seemed bursting from the mad rush up the darkened stairs. She drove herself around another turn, and the unseen steps ended.
The top! Staggering rather than walking, she made her way out on the floor where she and Fitzmaurice had spent the afternoon.
The afternoon! It was then the man had voiced the words from which her great idea had been born. As they climbed the stair, he had likened the inside of the tower to a huge flue, and told of the lighting of church spires in Belgium to direct artillery fire. And that was the great idea itself.
Martout had said as large a beacon as might be.. Well, she would make him a beacon which would throw its light over the château and the court, and the trenches where the gray-clad foe was lying as well. The guns of France should have a mark at which to shoot, which they could not mistake. The tower was old, its woodwork dry as tinder. Its stone walls were a mighty chimney. The door at its bottom, half wrecked, would give ample draft. This tower—the shrine of her childhood, her maidenhood, the shrine where her love had come upon her and given her the accolade of woman—she would fire with her own hand. Its blazing top should be her beacon, her sacrifice to France! So would she light the path!
There was a trap-door in the conical wooden roof, left for the purpose of gaining the cover in case of needed repairs. It was on the side to the west. How it all worked out to her need! Even the door was where it should be. She caught Jean's hand as he followed her closely, and led him to the wall.
"I shall lift you up in my arms," she told him quickly. "Hunt for the catch of the little door in the roof and push it open. Then crawl out on the roof yourself, and I will hand you up the can. Take off the cover and pour the oil over the shingles. Do you understand?"
"Yes, mademoiselle," he assured her..
"You're not afraid to go out there and do it?"
"No, mademoiselle."
"Come then." She caught him about the body and raised him as high as her strength could compass. "Do you feel the trap-door, Jean? Feel quickly."
"No, mademoiselle. I am feeling. I can't—yes, yes, I have found it. Now I have the catch."
"Open it quickly, Jean, quickly," she panted. "I—can't hold you—very long."
She strained upward against the weight of his body, calling upon the last reserve of her endurance, as it seemed. She must hold him so—she would—she would. Surely he could be but a moment longer.
She staggered. Her ears were drumming. Her arms shook and trembled as she forced them to their task. She heard the rasp of wood on wood. The weight in her arms grew greater for a tortured second—lightened.
"I shall draw myself outside now, mademoiselle," said Jean, and slipped quite beyond her grasp.
Looking upward, she saw a dim rectangle studded with stars, against which the boy's body moved. Abruptly his voice came down again in a whisper.
"Now, mademoiselle, the can, if you please."
She lifted and thrust it up at arm's length. She saw Jean bend downward in shadowy outline through the trap. The can left her stretching fingers and she stood alone.
With a gasp of relief she turned back across the floor. How well she knew it! Even in the dark she made her way unerringly to the chair where she had sat and listened to those first words of stammered love. There, too, was the box on which he had sat. She dragged them against each other, bent despite her haste of action and kissed the back of the chair in farewell. She began, then, piling other broken chairs and boxes upon those first two, until she had a good-sized heap.
Taking the can she herself had carried, she unscrewed its top and poured the contents over the pile she had built and the floor about it. When the can was quite empty, she ran back below the open trapdoor.
"Jean!" she called softly. "Jean!"
"Yes, mademoiselle. Shall I light it now?"
"You have a match?"
"Of course, mademoiselle."
"Then crawl quite to the edge of the trapdoor, strike your match inside the roof, light the oil and drop down here at once."
She clasped her hands and stood waiting. It was almost finished. In one instant more the beacon would be lighted. But she did not falter. Rather she urged haste.
"Quickly, Jean, quickly!" she admonished the boy above her.
A match sparkled into blue flame over her head, as she strained her eyes upward. The boy was kneeling on the very edge of the trap. The tiny glow of the match moved outward beyond her vision to be followed by a swift flare as the oil on the roof caught in a spurt of spreading flame. Jean's body shot downward, to hang at arms' length briefly, and drop at her feet.
"Come!" she cried as he scrambled up.
Like him she had brought matches. Lighting one against the stone wall, she returned to the oil-soaked pile of furniture and boxes on the floor.
"Good-by," she whispered and dropped the match into its heaped-up midst. It flickered and caught, and burst suddenly into a pillar of fire, gathered volume with the swiftness of an explosion and leaped in hot, licking tongues which lapped the inside of the burning roof. A vivid flare of burning oil spread in a pool of flame in the center of the floor, lighting up the whole interior with quivering light.
For one brief moment Jacqueline stood watching. Her eyes turned slowly from the dancing flames and swept about the well-known place where so many long hours of her budding life had been spent.
"Good-by," she whispered again, "oh, good-by," and caught Jean's hand in her own, leading him toward the stairs.
They ran down swiftly, now that their work was done. Behind them the roof burst into a hundred tongues of fire, which brightened to throw a dull red glow over all the château and on across the newly dug trenches, as the flames leaped up toward the sky. The path was lighted! Its beacon stood a vivid pillar of fire against the night.
CRASH, crash—crash, crash—crash, crash!
The whole night so silent not long before, save for the voice of a cricket shrilling somewhere in sibilant cadence, became suddenly simply the vortex of a maelstrom of grinding, rending sound to Jacqueline, running rapidly down the tower stairs, with the hot hand of the boy fast in her own. So quickly as that did France answer the fiery signal which was already beginning to roar dully over the heads of the boy and woman, with an ever-brightening glare.
Crash, crash—crash, crash—crash, crash! Batteries of field-guns, firing in sections, each at a somewhat different angle, were sweeping the trenches and the ground beyond them with a spreading shrapnel hell.
Roar! A deeper, heavier note—the voice of a heavy French cannon, hurling its great shell. Chaos! the note of the shells' explosion, drowning all else for the moment, setting walls to rocking, filling the ears with a rending reverberation, which drove the drums inward to deadness and seemed to shake the very senses ere it died.
The boy beside the woman whimpered, a plaint of inarticulate terror wrung in involuntary outcry from his lips. Keeping fast hold of his hand, Jacqueline raced on and down, around and around, to regain the open mouth of the tunnel and run back through its length to the room behind the kitchen. As she passed them, the light of the fire above her began to shine in through the old, old slits in the stone sides of the tower as faint red reflections. The flash, flash of the shrapnel explosions shot through in stabs of sudden brilliance, like the flicker of lightning, whose thunder was their ear-stabbing detonations. Again Jean whimpered in words:
"Mademoiselle—I—I am afraid now, mademoiselle."
"Come," she panted back. "We must get back to the tunnel, Jean. Hurry, Jean, hurry!"
A new sound struck on her ear even as she spoke. Inside the tower, snapping out above the outer roar and rend of explosions, the staccato call of a bugle, the dull diapason of men's voices, came the sound of heavy footsteps pounding on stone. It echoed in the throat of the place as a new note of menace. Some one—several persons, to judge by the sound, were rushing up the darkened stairs toward herself and the boy.
Comprehension came even as she sensed their approach. Soldiers were mounting to attack and quench the pillar of fire she had lighted to guide her nation through the night!
She paused, gasping in sudden horror of her position. The sensation of a trapped creature assailed her briefly. Then she gathered her staggering wits in a desperate consideration of her plight. Above her head the fire raged in growing fury. Below, the rage of mankind mounted against her and Jean, no less cruel, no less pitiless in its way than the fire itself, should they fall into its grasp.
A third avenue presented to her struggling senses. In a flash it came to her rescue. Where the stairs spiraled about the inside wall, several of the tower's separate floors had been built into central rooms. To find the door of such a room and slip inside while the upward-climbing men dashed by—by that way lay possible safety.
She flung herself against the inner wall which marked the limits of a room on the floor where she stood. Groping, feeling, sliding desperate hands along it, she searched for the saving portal, fumbling her way on and on along the wall, while her heart pounded in her ears in heavy blows of blood, little less audible than the pound of boots coming nearer and nearer up the stairs.
At last her fingers fell upon the door. Throwing her weight against it, she forced it open by a frantic effort, thrust Jean before her and followed, to sink down in a gasping heap upon the floor, behind its shield.
Hoarse gutturals came to her ears as she crouched there, the close panting of men running up, slipping and stumbling and cursing in the darkness. Then they were past, still mounting, while she knelt with the boy clinging against her, her breath caught fast in her throat.
She reached out and put her arms about Jean, gathering him to her. There was comfort in the human contact for them both. They knelt there in the darkness of the room, clinging together and waiting, while the night split with mingled sounds, to which a new note was being added—a dull, heavy pulsing which throbbed and died and throbbed again.
Like the great flue to which Fitzmaurice had compared it, the old tower was beginning to give off a dull reverberatory voice, roaring its own death-song from its age-hoarsened throat as it spat forth its life in fire.
Through it, the feet were coming back. No use to seek to quench the pyre of the tower in dissolution. They turned back and plunged down the way they had come. In a harsh clatter they pounded past the door behind which their tender quarry crouched, and ran on down toward the courtyard, where their comrades huddled under the shrapnel hail.
When the last thudding footfall was gone, Jacqueline Chinault crept out of her refuge and once more gained the stair, advancing less rapidly along its stone treads, until she had gone half-way around the tower from the room.
There she paused again and stood listening with strained intentness, ready to go on or run back as the need might arise. Yet, despite her known peril both from fire and men, she smiled as she stood, and her eyes lightened with something more than the glow of the fire through the time-aged slits—with the glow of accomplished purpose, which nothing to come could change.
She thrilled there in the fire-shot darkness with the divine fire of a service performed, and once more caught in a deep breath which lifted her young bust high. Come what might, her watch had been strong and true—she had kept her promise. Nothing could change that. No one might whisper that she had failed.
And just what might come she did not know now any longer. She had left the great stone lying beside the mouth of the tunnel, both in her haste to ascend and accomplish her task, and because she did not know if she could raise it should she close it, and had no time to seek to determine the fact.
If, however, the men who had been sent to extinguish the fire had seen it and closed it again, her way of escape was cut off. Or perhaps they would be guarding it merely, waiting for the inevitable time when she must descend, as the fire burned down from floor to floor. Or they might even have gone down and through the tunnel.
Her eyes darkened slightly at the latter thought. Would her aunt fall a victim to their revenge, and old Pierre and Marthe? Was the sacrifice to be on them, too, as well as on her home?
Close by where she stood, a narrow window was let into the outer wall. The light of the mounting flames flickered dully through it, seeming to brighten and dim in time with the harsh roar of the tower itself.
Jacqueline crept to it and looked out. The glare from above showed her the courtyard, glinted ruddy on the helmets of armed men packed there to withstand the assault. A shell had exploded against the western wall of the court and breached it in a great ragged gap, backed by tumbled stones and overthrown trestles on which had been placed the defenders' platforms. And mixed with trestles and stones were the distorted, half-buried figures of men, caught and borne down in the sudden destruction.
Some wind had come up with the approach of morning. It caught the smoke from the burning tower and swung it in choking, trailing banners above the court full of men, blurring and half concealing them for a moment, lifting again like a swinging curtain, to show them massed back of the gap in the wall, still waiting for the assault they knew must come.
The tower shook to its base. A great flare of fire started up beyond the wall itself. Before Jacqueline's eyes, it seemed that the thick stone structure she had known since the days of her first baby staring bowed inward, split into a thousand fragments. The line of men standing behind it on still firm trestles appeared to rise in the air, in whirling, writhing units, to fall back in helpless impotence, dropping down on a fresh pile of stone which now backed a second breach in the wall.
And then, while the men in the court shuffled and drew back momentarily from that fiery center of destruction, right in their packed midst grew a mushroom of flaring, darting fire, rolled in a vast white blanket of smoke, from which by degrees emerged a tangled pile of legs and arms and bodies, heaped in blended death, where an instant before had been ranks of stalwart beings, strong, ready, in the full tide of life.
A shouting grew. Drawn by men, running, lunging, struggling over and through the new corpses of the courtyard, a machine-gun lumbered over the flags, was wrenched through the red ruck and forced into position back of one of the breaches.
Another followed hard on the trail of the first, crushing a heedless path over what had been men so short a time before. It, too, was faced about and planted back of the second ragged gap she had seen torn through the solid stones. Its crew tugged and strained and labored in superhuman exertion to bring it where it might command the fresh danger-point through which the attack must come.
THIS was war! This thing, where men stood huddled
thickly and waited and were shot down by guns far beyond
their reach, torn limb from limb, mangled, rent, shattered;
where they fell in heaps of dead and dying to be crushed
yet farther by the iron wheels of other guns in the hands
of their own comrades, without a thought; this inferno
of sound, of shooting and shouting, where the night grew
brilliant from the death flash of shells, the air sibilant
from the whistle of shrapnel, spraying out and over and
down; where men wept and cursed and prayed, labored and
struggled and died—was war!
And this court beneath her sick eyes, where men writhed and swayed like fiends in the pit of some storied inferno, was a mere glimpse, an infinitesimal portion of the major conflict which was waging across the far fields.
Out there beyond the court other sounds told of other similar scenes, where the men in the trenches held on and struggled under a metal hail to drive back the attack of other men like themselves, who sought to drive them out from their positions and force them back. If the skirmish of the morning had thrilled her, this struggle appalled. She turned her face back to the boy at her side, to find him clinging to the sill of the window with both hands, staring out, silent and wide-eyed.
He turned up his face.
"See," he panted in excitement. "See, mademoiselle—over there on the steps."
Jacqueline shifted her gaze. In front of the château door a body of men were standing in a closely gathered group. There was no mistaking their personnel, or the figure above whose face gleamed the golden eagle on his helmet, about whom hung the long, gray cloak of the Prussian officer in the field. He was standing among his staff, surveying the scene in the courtyard. She recognized the quondam Colonel Friedreich, director of her country's foes on this part of the front.
Even while she watched, she saw one of the men about him lift an arm and gesture toward the open door at their back. It seemed to her that he appealed to his superior to seek shelter within.
Friedreich shook his head in impatient protest. He was physically brave then, for he must know his danger in that shell-swept court. Yet he stood unmoved, watching the men before him, more as a spectator than an active participant in the struggle.
Another shell burst not far from him, taking its toll from the living. The rest stood firm, apparently unmoved by the sudden death. Another flashed out, as it seemed, directly against one of the machine-guns where the gunners were still toiling to get it into position. The smoke of its bursting passed and showed the gunners quiet, the gun itself sagged to one side on a broken wheel, its muzzle slanting drunkenly up at the sky.
Friedreich lifted an arm and pointed. A shrill whistle began its skirling through the uproar. The huddled men in the courtyard ran forward in close-set ranks, some mounting the still standing trestles, others taking positions at the breaches, back of and even in irregular lines across the piles of broken stone.
As abruptly as it had broken out, the vicious gun-fire died down. Jacqueline saw Friedreich point again toward the west. Then slowly and without haste, he gathered his cloak about him and descended the steps to cross toward the eastern gate and disappear beneath it.
As he went, a sound of shrill, high-pitched yelling burst forth. It rose and sank and rose again in the blended volume of many human throats baying their own advance.
The lines near the wall back of the breaches stiffened. With a sudden grip in her breast, a dull-seeming contraction of her heart in horror, Jacqueline sensed it as the voice of the attack, crying itself through the fire-shot night. Somewhere out there, the French were rushing forward to storm the shrapnel-raked trenches, and the shell-torn wall. The time for gun-fire had passed while she watched, and now it was time for the final desperate grapple, man to man, while the long, keen bayonets flashed.
She saw the crew of the one machine-gun, back of a breach, working about it in a frenzied haste. Of a sudden it cut loose in a grinding roar, made up and shot through by a myriad of separate explosions. Briefly it drowned out that frantic yelling, and then the voices of many men seemed to mount even above its furious snarling and come nearer and nearer. The rifles of the men on the trestles and crouched on the ragged heaps of stones began to crackle.
Again the tower shook and trembled. This time, however, the cause appeared to her quivering senses to be from within. A heavy cracking and creaking filled the darkness where she stood. It was followed at once by a grating, grinding fall. For a moment the light of the fire sank, so that the whole blurred picture of the court before her paled into a half light. Then it flared up brighter even than before.
She realized clearly what had happened. The upper floor having burned through, had fallen upon that below it. Little by little the fire was eating its way down over her head, making her peril greater. No matter what might lie below, she could not stay where she was much longer. She gave a final glance through the window.
The pandemonium of shots and yells kept up. In a sudden surge, she saw red and blue forms leap through the ragged rent in the wall. They sprang in with the long knives of their bayonets thrust and pushed forward, cutting and stabbing at the gray bodies of the men who opposed them, lunging and drawing back and lunging again, parrying and jabbing, so quickly that she could not follow, and took it all in as a wild jumble of savage rage, rather than in any detail. But it fired her, roused her from the almost paralyzing spell of horror, which had chained her and held her.
Red and blue were the colors of French soldiers. Those long, flashing bits of steel were the bayonets of France. The flood of French advance was lapping the ragged gaps in the wall, dashing against the gray wall of German resistance, dashing up and up, and—
Or no! Like the pulse of the fire she had lighted, her spirit sank again. The attack at the breach where the machine-gun sputtered had failed. Those red and blue forms which had pushed in at the other, had been cut down. Their brilliant colors had dropped and mingled with the somber gray of their victims on the tumbled piles of stone. They were cut off, driven back. Their yelling had died. Save for the rattle of the small arms, the two forces struggled almost in silence under the flare of her fire.
Yet she was roused. That fire was eating steadily down, burning more fiercely as it sank. A soft wind had begun to fan past her and the boy where they had waited and watched. It was the draft from the open door below, sucked up through the tower, to whip the flames to a greater destruction.
If she were to escape and gain safety for the lad who had come of his own accord to help her, she must attempt it soon. And surely, she thought, there could be no better time than now, when the men in the court were exerting every energy to repel the men who attacked.
"Come," she whispered to Jean, still clinging by the window.
She caught his hand once more in hers and began to creep on down the stairway.
Jean looked back toward the point of vantage he had lost.
"They will win, mademoiselle?" he questioned. "They have been driven back this once, but they will come again, think you not?"
"They must," said the girl, drawing him on beside her. "They must. Jean—oh, Jean, they must—come back."
The door to the tower stood open. Through it as she paused just at the last turn of the stairs, she caught a glimpse of the lighted court where the Germans still fought for possession. The human sound of the conflict swept in and about her in an increased volume with her nearness—shouts, cries, mouthings of rage and fear and terror, of anger and pain, shrieks and screams, the muffled jumble of heavy feet on the stones, the massed panting and breathing of men, and over all, the rattle of rifle-fire, the renewed snarl of the machine-gun—more yells.
A dim light stole in also and showed her anxious eyes the flagstone, still lying free of the mouth of the tunnel. Those who had entered and mounted to the top had evidently taken no time to bother with it. The attack had been too sudden, too pressing. They had passed it by and so left her way of escape still open. A little prayer of thanksgiving stirred in her heart as she found it so.
But between her and it lay the distance from where she stood to the mouth of the tunnel itself. At any moment while they crossed it, the boy at her side and herself might be discovered and swift reprisal fall even now upon them. Yet delay would gain them nothing.
Taking a firmer grip on the hand in her own, she went down one step and another—and another, till the outer light shone in fully upon her. Her feet touched the stones of the floor at last. A swift rush, and safety.
"Come," she panted as it seemed to her she had been doing for long hours, and began to drag Jean forward across the floor.
With a strangled cry, she paused. A figure reeled in through the door of the tower, from the court. It was that of a fair-haired youth, his round face wide-eyed, his lips a strange purple in the half light, set and pressed together as he stumbled toward her.
One hand still clung to a rifle, the butt of which dragged on the stones. The other was raised and forced into his side, through the ill-fitting fabric of his blouse. And below the wedging fist there were dark streaks and blotches on the cloth.
He lurched through the door, turned his head and stared directly at Jacqueline and Jean. He halted and remained standing and staring.
Quite slowly his contracted mouth relaxed into something like a smile. His gun fell and rattled on the flagging. He lifted both hands and stretched them toward what seemed to his dulling brain like a woman.
"Mutter!" he cried aloud, lunged forward and fell on his face.
Her heart bursting with horror, her knees knocking one against the other, Jacqueline knew he had died. Abruptly she woke to action. Before that huddled thing, she swept Jean into her arms, crushing him to her as some mother had once perhaps gathered the form of the youth on the floor, and fled in long steps toward the screening dark oblong of the tunnel.
Still holding him to her, she dropped down, turned about and thrust a searching leg below her for the top of the first step which would carry them out of that region of madness, where men were shot and thrust through and cried to their mothers and died.
When she found it, she threw all her weight on that limb and slipped the other down to join it. Not until she stood in the utter blackness of the lower passage, did she put the boy down, or know that she was sobbing dryly, with catch after catch of choking emotion in breast and throat.
Faint, far away now as it seemed from the angle at which she heard it, came once more the sound of that high-charging outcry.
"They are coming back now—mademoiselle," said Jean Giroux at her side.
"Come," she once more made answer.' It seemed she could say nothing else, that her brain was too full of wild surging emotions to seek for other means of expression save that one short word.
She turned and began to grope down one wall, guiding her progress with her hands against the stones, sensing rather than hearing the patter of Jean's feet as he crept along at her back. Groping, stumbling, but always advancing, they went forward toward the room at the end and the bed in front of the panel, and so out through it at the last to find the candle still burning, and Pierre and Marthe huddled on chairs beside the bed—waiting.
MADAME ST. DIE turned her eyes as Jacqueline
appeared. She nodded slowly.
"No need to ask if you did what you went for," she remarked. "Our ears have given evidence of that. I sent Pierre up to tell me what was going on, but he ran back, saying it was dangerous to remain, as no doubt it was."
The old man nodded.
"But yes; terrible things are going on up there, mademoiselle. A great shell came through the dining-room wall and struck one of those drunken officers and killed him. He lies there now on the floor with the broken glasses and bottles. And there is a huge hole in the wall, one could drive a cow through to pasture. Had the shell exploded we would all have died, I am sure. We should have been crushed by the falling walls. It would have torn the house to pieces! I did not see the shell—only the dead man and the hole in the wall, and then I returned. It appeared unsafe to remain longer."
Sounds which floated to them gave audible confirmation of his words. Shots, the report of cannon once more firing, snouts and yells, and the growling murmur of many human atoms locked in deadly strife, came from the outer world where the conflict still raged.
The invalid shrugged as Pierre ceased speaking.
"I imagine a shell hit the wall and drove a portion of it inward. The man was probably killed by a bit of flying stone. Well, child, well, do we win?"
And as if in answer, there swept through the room a new note, unheard until now—the ringing sound of full-throated cheering, rising in exultant volume, sinking, rising again, shrill, clear, unmarked by the gruffer gutturals of the Teuton, the higher cadence of Frankish voices raised in triumphant cry.
Jacqueline straightened and stood while it rang out and sank and rang again. Her breast rose in a great, gasping inhalation. Her eyes darkened and flashed with the sudden fire of conviction. She turned then toward the woman on the bed.
"Do you hear it!" she cried, overborne by her excitement. "Do you hear it? That is our answer. The French are cheering. The French!"
In a rush she had reached the door and darted through it, running across the kitchen and up the stairs to the hall.
Up there a lamp still burned in the smoke-clogged air and the lighted court showed full of red- and blue-clad men, streaming past the open door of the hall and pressing on toward the farther gate to the east. They ran singly and in groups, their faces eager, lighted by the still flaring tower, and there were only red and blue figures now. The gray-clad forms which had filled the court when last she saw it, seemed to have completely disappeared.
It was true, then. France had carried the wall, stormed the breaches, won the position. The cheers she had heard had been victory's, cry. Jacqueline's heart leaped and the fire in her eyes deepened and glowed. They had followed the path she had lighted. She had fired the beacon and France had responded—France!
The door of the dining-room stood open. She glanced in. As Pierre had said, a great hole gaped in the wall and the dead German lay sprawled on the floor between it and the table. She saw him dimly in the light of another murky lamp far back on a serving-table in a corner, set amid bottles of wine.
She turned from the picture. The red and blue groups were still charging through the courtyard. Some of them had taken off their red képis and were waving them as they ran. Behind them the cannon still belched sharply, throwing their shells above them to fall amid the retreating foe. Suddenly rifle-fire rattled out to the east in a crashing ripple of fresh sound.
And suddenly out of the red-and-blue masses, swarming past before her eyes, appeared a figure clad in the tan of khaki, which turned off and bounded up the steps at a leap, and sprang in through the door. It was that of a man whose eyes darted this way and that in a questing fashion as he ran toward her down the hall.
And then he caught sight of her and cried her name, springing toward her through the smoke-fogged air.
"Jacqueline! Jacqueline! Thank God—you're here—you're safe!"
She ran to meet him, catching him with her hands and clinging to him while his arms went around her, and she lifted her face.
"Maurice," she faltered, half laughing, half sobbing, only to have the word crushed on her lips by his.
"You're quite all right?" said Fitzmaurice after that moment of meeting. "Oh, girl, how I have worried! But, oh, Lord, what a target you gave us! When it flashed you ought to have heard Martout swear. He cursed by all the sacrés of France that there was no woman anywhere like you, and, by gad! he's right. It was a wonderful thing to do—that firing of the tower—that directing with your own hands the fire of the guns against both yourself and your aunt. It's thing from the pages of romance itself. You offered your home, your breast, your heart, as a target for France. There isn't—there never will be—any one quite like you."
Jacqueline flushed. Her eyes dropped. Then and then only she sighted the bloodstained wrapping about Fitzmaurice's left hand—the same hand she had held in the tower, in the midst of their make-believe.
And, as then, she caught it in her own, save that now all the anxiety of the woman for the loved one was alive in her voice and eyes.
"Maurice!" she panted. "You are hurt! What is it? Tell me—tell me."
Fitzmaurice smiled. The spirit of whimsy came into his face, making it once more utterly boyish.
"Prithee, fair lady, 'tis nothing," said he. "'Tis at worst but a scratch, clumsily wrapped by myself. 'Twill fare better I fancy, if so be it is wound in a silken scarf."
Jacqueline Chinault laughed with a laugh which caught in its beginning, and went on and caught again, and broke in something like a sob. She lifted the hand in both of hers and laid it against her, pressing it to her, over her heart.
"Maurice," she begged, "don't make light of it, my dear one. Don't try to spare me. Tell me how badly you are injured. What is it? How bad?"
"A bullet clean through," said Fitzmaurice quite gently. "Never even saw the bullet. I caught it, but it got away—was going too beastly fast to hold. I wrapped up the hand and kept right on coming. I wanted to get here and find out about you. Nothing to worry about, girlie, really, though it will stop me from flying for a few days, I suppose."
Her eyes leaped to his. Her voice dropped, and grew deeper, richer, fuller, with a quiver of yearning in its timbre.
"A few days? Maurice—oh, Maurice—will you spend them here—with me?"
IT WAS finished. So far as Château Chinault was concerned the thing was over and done. The gray light of a new day was creeping up over the lulls to the north and east.
For hours, as it seemed to her tired mind and body, Jacqueline and Marthe, Pierre and Jean, and Fitzmaurice who insisted on following her about and would not let her out of his sight, had carried bedding and featherbeds and mattresses from bedrooms and storerooms, and laid them in rows in the drawing-room and the hall and even in the courtyard under hastily stretched canvas shelters.
And while they labored, men with brassards about their arms on which glowed the red cross of Geneva, were busy bearing red- and blue- and gray-clad forms and laying them down on the extemporized pallets thus afforded. To and fro they moved from courtyard and trench and back again, winnowing the living and wounded from the dead; at first by the light of lanterns, and now under the first faint fingers of the dawn.
In the dining-room, in the fight of many lamps, collected and set for the purpose, surgeons worked at their grim tasks of mercy and saving. Into that room went stretcher after stretcher, men limping alone, men aided by a comrade, hanging pallid-lipped, pinched-faced on a supporting arm, sometimes seeking to smile as the better choice to a groan.
Out of that room came bandaged men, walking or borne in the merciful sleep of the anesthetic, or white and drawn from the ordeal sustained without its blunting aid.
And in the shambles of the courtyard, too, worked other parties, lifting and bearing away the burden of the slain, taking them down to the trenches where still other men worked with shovels, as they had about that other trench the day before.
Jacqueline's eyes grew dark, grew soft and moist with compassion, as the rows of wounded bodies grew steadily longer and longer with each fresh addition. The maternal in woman, which makes her yearn to soothe and succor suffering and pain, drove her to seek some means of bringing some little comfort to those pain-racked forms of men whose bravery she had witnessed during that hour of horror when they swarmed to the attack.
And in her desire to help, she turned, woman-like, to the man out of them all whom she herself loved, whose presence close beside her made her strangely happy amid those gripping scenes of pain.
"What can I do? Isn't there something—some little thing I can do to help them?" she questioned Fitzmaurice. "Oh, Maurice—I want to—to do something. What?"
He answered her promptly:
"Coffee. Strong, hot coffee, for all of them able to drink it. The Dutchmen have the idea fast enough in keeping their men's stomachs full of hot fluid."
Jacqueline nodded acceptance of his advice. Calling Pierre, she sent him to the storerooms, and herself took Marthe and Maurice down to the kitchen to put great kettles of water on the stove to boil. While it was heating she and the Lieutenant, his hand now neatly bandaged, wrapped coffee in bits of clean cloth and dropped the packages so formed into the scalding water to bob about and steep out their flavor and strength.
While they worked, Fitzmaurice told her and her aunt, who insisted upon their presence in her room, of the attack: How, drawing back quickly, they had come up with a column hurrying to their support; how the earlier reinforcements promised had been diverted to a sadly pressed part of the line, where they turned the tide of battle at a critical moment; how not only here but elsewhere the tide of invasion had been checked, held, even turned back; how still west and to the north, the army of Paris itself had rushed out and thrown itself as a last impetus against the gray hordes and hurled them backward in a confusion amounting, according to reports, to almost a rout; how when the column had been met they had turned around and stolen back, moving with the utmost caution, slipping down on the unsuspecting force at the château with scarcely a sound, until they were as close as they dared come lest they be prematurely discovered.
He then related how the guns had been trained as nearly as might be without an actual guide, and how the gunners had stood by them waiting—waiting for the time chosen for the attack; how the infantry had lain down, sprawling on their arms, ready to leap up and rush the trenches and the château itself at a word; and what a splendid mark had been given for their fire by the flaming tower!
"That was a wonderful inspiration," he made an end. "It took a cool head to think of and carry it through. It not only gave us a mark, but lit up the whole country. How'd you ever come to think of it, dear girl?"
Jacqueline flushed.
"You gave me the idea yourself, when you likened the tower to a chimney, Maurice."
"By Jove!" said Fitzmaurice, eying her in palpable admiration, and spilling coffee on the floor. "By Jove!"
Madame St. Die sniffed.
"I think some of that coffee is ready," she remarked with suggestion.
Thereafter Marthe and Pierre and Jean bore great pots of the hot black beverage from the kitchen up the stairs where Jacqueline and Fitzmaurice took it and doled it out in cups to the wounded, and sent more to the heavy-eyed infantry who remained in possession, while the bulk of the French force pushed on after the retreating Germans. Had there been any doubt as to whether the château was to be held, it would have vanished as the gray light of day grew brighter.
For the stream of advance went on. Long lines of men, artillery still canvas-covered, of ammunition wagons, of cavalry, of supply motors and buses commandeered from the streets of Paris, came on and on from the west, moving steadily into the east, to hold what was gained and drive the advantage farther and farther home without delay.
It was of such things the man and the girl spoke as they moved along the line of hastily laid down pallets, lifting helpless shoulders, holding the cups of coffee to pain-twisted lips, watching the eager clutch of them over the edge of the cups to reach the resting fluid, meeting the dumb thanks of eyes, the mumbled thanks of tongues.
And it was such news, which set dulled eyes to flashing again, brought gleams of teeth from between the lips of endurance, a rally of vital force to the spur of new words of advance, in place of retreat.
Numbers of lesser wounded volunteered their aid in the task of ministering to their more sorely stricken comrades. But over the graver cases, Jacqueline insisted on hovering in person, moving like a good angel of comfort through the lines of pain, where the only sound was of suffering now, the only desire for the gentle hand, the softer tone—and rest.
Yet there were lighter incidents even there—little sidelights, as it were, on human nature—like the giant gaunt private who burst from the room where the surgeons worked, smoking a short, black pipe, swearing strange oaths and waving a bandaged hand, which he paused to thrust before Jacqueline's eyes.
"Look, mademoiselle," he bellowed. "I have lost a finger. An infernal piece of something or other bit it off. The surgeon says I am to go back to a hospital because of the fact. Sent back, do you hear, for a thing like that. Nom d'un nom! Have I not seven fingers and two perfectly good thumbs yet to give to France? Am I to be disgraced before my comrades? Nom de Dieu I shall report myself to my company and go on fighting, and I shall kill seven Germans for each finger I lose."
And there was the bed on the floor, which Jacqueline reached with Fitzmaurice beside her, on which lay a youth whose face seemed strangely familiar, as his eyes turned up to hers.
Not until he spoke, however, did she know him; and then came recollection all at once.
"Hola, mademoiselle!" he remarked as she knelt beside him with her cup in hand. "I stand not so straight as I did yesterday morning when we spoke in the hall."
Then Jacqueline knew. He was the little sentry who had been posted outside the dining-room door, when Fitzmaurice went in to make his report to the major. He had told her about his sweetheart, and how the girl called Mimi had wept when he left for his depot to join the forces in the field. That was before love had come to herself, but the recollection gave a personal note to her question as she answered:
"And are you badly hurt?"
"A bayonet thrust through the leg," he said simply. "But all the same I am lucky. It will heal, and Mimi no doubt will think me quite a hero. She will be proud, don't you think?"
"Of course she will," said Jacqueline, slipping an arm under his head and setting her cup to his lips.
"Because," he went on after he had drunk, "our Capitaine, just before the charge, told us the first man through the breach in the wall would have his name sent up for the cross of the Legion. Mon Dieu! I was not the first as it happened, but I was the first to get through and five, and of what good would the 'cross' be to the others? I hope I shall win it. After victory comes, Mimi and I shall tell our children how their father won it. But that is a long look ahead—we are not yet married. Still, it is a fine thought, is it not?"
Jacqueline nodded. She didn't know just whether she wanted to cry or laugh. She put down the boy's head and stood up. He was the last at the end of the line.
She turned to find Fitzmaurice waiting with an empty pot in his hands. She found his eyes upon her in a strange expression. It came to her that he had heard the words of the little sentry. An odd little quiver thrilled through her beneath that new look in his eyes.
Despite the weariness of body and limb and brain, induced by the strain of the night and all which had followed, a soft color crept up and dyed her throat and the white of her cheeks to her hair. She pointed to the empty pot in his hands and turned away, walking quickly, with that queer, small tremor once more shaking her being.
Fitzmaurice followed her quite down to the kitchen. They filled the pot and made one more trip, this time out to the courtyard, where the more slightly wounded were now sitting under awnings of canvas and swapping tales of the action, smoking, chattering, laughing, even beginning a game of cards. The courtyard had been cleared of all its grim reminders save the tumbled piles of rock back of the breaches and certain dull spots on the stones. Even the wrecked machine-gun had been dragged outside.
Fitzmaurice set down his pot of coffee and told the men to help themselves. Then, taking Jacqueline by the arm, he led her slowly across the court toward the door of the tower itself. It had burned itself out. Save for a feather of smoke rising above its stone rim and drifting idly upward, there was little to speak from without of the part it had played.
At the door the Englishman paused and stared in at the ruin which had been wrought.'
"I still don't understand just how you got in here to light it," he remarked. "But you did say to Martout and me that you thought you knew of a way. How did you manage?"
She smiled.
"It was simple." Briefly she told him of the tunnel below them. "Its end lies under those half-burned timbers, there, Maurice." Her lips drooped. "My poor tower! It is burned quite out."
"It served a splendid purpose," said the man.
Jacqueline nodded.
"Yes, I know. But, oh, Maurice, I hated so to light it. It was mine. All my life I have loved it. It was so full of memories—of the things we spoke of up there yesterday afternoon. And of them all, to me the very last was the best. I couldn't have done it if it hadn't been for France. You see, Maurice, women are like that. First they have to love a thing very much, and then—then if they do love it very much—oh, ever and ever so much, they will sacrifice themselves for the thing they love, just as I sacrificed my dear tower for France, or a mother will suffer anything to save her baby, or a woman will suffer with and for the man she loves."
The man thrilled at her words. But he made no immediate answer. He stood and gazed out toward the eastern hills, where the light was steadily growing. At length he spoke:
"And yet, but for what you did, the sacrifice you made, the new day coming up over there might have showed a different sight to us here. It was you, dear, who won for France, as much as her men.
"Yesterday, for the first time, France checked the invasion at all parts of the line. You made it possible for her to do it here. This growing dawn is that of a new day for your country—in which she sees the threatened danger averted at least for a time. And because of what came to us up there in the tower, it is a new day for you and for me—for us—the first new day of our love."
She drew closer to him, stood by his side and let her eyes turn also where he looked. They stood beside each other, a man and a woman, with their faces turned to the east and the dawn. The hush of that hour when day awakes seemed to hold them for the present, while great rose fingers shot up above the hills, which veiled the retiring wrack of battle. Those fingers painted the future for them of rose.
They were young, they loved. Of that greater future, held in the dark womb of time, they thought little just then. The present was theirs. Of the outcome of that Armageddon which had fallen across the land of Europe, they nor no man could speak for more than the present.
For them, for their nation, the grim march of events alone must spell the final end. And something of all that stirred in the breast of the girl as she stood by the side of the man.
"A new day," she said softly. "Its dawn is the color of roses." For a moment she let her tired body lean against him lightly. "The color of roses, my dear one. And I love it—our new day—and all the new days which are to be ours. And I love France, too, Maurice. But—" she turned to him wholly, with all her woman's soul shining out through her confession—"more than anything, better than anything else in all the world, Maurice, I love—just you."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page