Complete weird tales of.., p.80
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 80
Out on the heights of La Moncelle, of Daigny, and Givonne lanterns glimmered where the good Sisters of Mercy and the ambulance corps passed among the dead and dying — the thirty-five thousand dead and dying! The plateau of Illy, where the cavalry had charged again and again, was twinkling with thousands of lanterns; on the heights of Frénois Prussian torches swung, signalling victory.
But the spectacle in the interior of the town — a town of nineteen thousand people, into which now were crushed seventy thousand frantic soldiers, was dreadful beyond description. Horror multiplied on horror. The two bridges and the streets were so jammed with horses and artillery trains that it seemed impossible for any human being to move another inch. In the glare of the flames from the houses on fire, in the middle of the smoke, horses, cannon, fourgons, charrettes, ambulances, piles of dead and dying, formed a sickening pell-mell. In this chaos starving soldiers, holding lighted lanterns, tore strips of flesh from dead horses lying in the mud, killed by the shells. Arms, broken and foul with blood and mud — rifles, pistols, sabres, lances, casques, mitrailleuses — covered the pavements.
The gates of the town were closed; the water in the fortification moats reflected the red light from the flames. The glacis of the ramparts was covered by black masses of soldiers, watching the placing of a cordon of German sentinels around the walls.
All public buildings, all the churches, were choked with wounded; their blood covered everything. On the steps of the churches poor wretches sat bandaging their torn limbs with strips of bloody muslin.
Strange sounds came from the stone walls along the street, where zouaves, turcos, and line soldiers, cursing and weeping with rage, were smashing their rifles to pieces rather than surrender them. Artillerymen were spiking their guns, some ran them into the river, some hammered the mitrailleuses out of shape with pickaxes. The cavalry flung their sabres into the river, the cuirassiers threw away revolvers and helmets. Everywhere officers were breaking their swords and cursing the surrender. The officers of the 74th of the Line threw their sabres and even their decorations into the Meuse. Everywhere, too, regiments were burning their colours and destroying their eagles; the colonel of the 52d of the Line himself burned his colours in the presence of all the officers of the regiment, in the centre of the street. The 88th and 30th, the 68th, the 78th, and 74th regiments followed this example. “Mort aux Vaches!” howled a herd of half-crazed reservists, bursting into the crush. “Mort aux Prussiens! À la lanterne, Badinguet! Vive la République!”
Jack turned away from the window. The tall Sister of Mercy stood beside the bed where Lorraine lay.
Jack made a sign.
“She is asleep,” murmured the Sister; “you may come nearer now. Close the window.”
Before he could reach the bed the door was opened violently from without, and an officer entered swinging a lantern. He did not see Lorraine at first, but held the door open, saying to Jack: “Pardon, monsieur; this house is reserved. I am very sorry to trouble you.”
Another officer entered, an old man, covered to the eyes by his crimson gold-brocaded cap. Two more followed.
“There is a sick person here,” said Jack. “You cannot have the intention of turning her out! It is inhuman—”
He stopped short, stupefied at the sight of the old officer, who now stood bareheaded in the lantern-light, looking at the bed where Lorraine lay. It was the Emperor! — her father.
Slowly the Emperor advanced to the bed, his dreary eyes fixed on Lorraine’s pale cheeks.
In the silence the cries from the street outside rose clear and distinct:
“Vive la République! À bas l’Empereur!”
The Emperor spoke, looking straight at Lorraine: “Gentlemen, we cannot disturb a woman. Pray find another house.”
After a moment the officers began to back out, one by one, through the doorway. The Emperor still stood by the bed, his vague, inscrutable eyes fixed on Lorraine.
Jack moved towards the bed, trembling. The Emperor raised his colourless face.
“Monsieur — your sister? No — your wife?”
“My promised wife, sire,” muttered Jack, cold with fear.
“A child,” said the Emperor, softly.
With a vague gesture he stepped nearer, smoothed the coverlet, bent closer, and touched the sleeping girl’s forehead with his lips. Then he stood up, gray-faced, impassive.
“I am an old man,” he said, as though to himself. He looked at Jack, who now came close to him, holding out something in one hand. It was the steel box.
“For me, monsieur?” asked the Emperor.
Jack nodded. He could not speak.
The Emperor took the box, still looking at Jack.
There was a moment’s silence, then Jack spoke: “It may be too late. It is a plan of a balloon — we brought it to you from Lorraine—”
The uproar in the streets drowned his voice— “Mort à l’Empereur! À bas l’Empire!”
A staff-officer opened the door and peered in; the Emperor stepped to the threshold.
“I thank you — I thank you both, my children,” he said. His eyes wandered again towards the bed; the cries in the street rang out furiously.
“Mort à l’Empereur!”
The Sister of Mercy was kneeling by the bed; Jack shivered, and dropped his head.
When he looked up the Emperor had gone.
All night long he watched at the bedside, leaning on his elbow, one hand shading his eyes from the candle-flame. The Sister of Mercy, white and worn with the duties of that terrible day, slept upright in an arm-chair.
Dawn brought the sad notes of Prussian trumpets from the ramparts pealing through the devastated city; at sunrise the pavements rang and shook with the trample of the White Cuirassiers. A Saxon infantry band burst into the “Wacht am Rhine” at the Paris Gate; the Place Turenne vomited Uhlans. Jack sank down by the bed, burying his face in the sheets.
The Sister of Mercy rubbed her eyes and started up. She touched Jack on the shoulder.
“I am going to be very ill,” he said, raising a face burning with fever. “Never mind me, but stay with her.”
“I understand,” said the Sister, gently. “You must lie in the room beyond.”
The fever seized Jack with a swiftness incredible.
“Then — swear it — by the — by the Saviour there — there on your crucifix!” he muttered.
“I swear,” she answered, softly.
His mind wandered a little, but he set his teeth and rose, staggering to the table. He wrote something on a bit of paper with shaking fingers.
“Send for them,” he said. “You can telegraph now. They are in Brussels — my sister — my family—”
Then, blinded by the raging fever, he made his way uncertainly to the bed, groped for Lorraine’s hand, pressed it, and lay down at her feet.
“Call the surgeon!” he gasped.
And it was very many days before he said anything else with as much sense in it.
“God help them!” cried the Sister of Mercy, tearfully, her thin hands clasped to her lips. Alone she guided Jack into the room beyond.
Outside the Prussian bands were playing. The sun flung a long, golden beam through the window straight across Lorraine’s breast.
She stirred, and murmured in her sleep, “Jack! Jack! ‘Tiens ta Foy!’”
But Jack was past hearing now; and when, at sundown, the young surgeon came into his room he was nearly past all aid.
“Typhoid?” asked the Sister.
“The Pest!” said the surgeon, gravely.
The Sister started a little.
“I will stay,” she murmured. “Send this despatch when you go out. Can he live?”
They whispered together a moment, stepping softly to the door of the room where Lorraine lay.
“It can’t be helped now,” said the surgeon, looking at Lorraine; “she’ll be well enough by to-morrow; she must stay with you. The chances are that he will die.”
The trample of the White Cuirassiers in the street outside filled the room; the serried squadrons thundered past, steel ringing on steel, horses neighing, trumpets sounding the “Royal March.” Lorraine’s eyes unclosed.
“Jack!”
There was no answer.
The surgeon whispered to the Sister of Mercy: “Don’t forget to hang out the pest flag.”
“Jack! Jack!” wailed Lorraine, sitting up in bed. Through the tangled masses of her heavy hair, gilded by the morning sunshine, her eyes, bright with fever, roamed around the room, startled, despairing. Under the window the White Cuirassiers were singing as they rode:
“Flieg’, Adler, flieg’! Wir stürmen nach,
Ein einig Volk in Waffen,
Wir stürmen nach ob tausendfach
Des Todes Pforten Klaffen!
Und fallen wir, flieg’, Adler, flieg’!
Aus unserm Blute mächst der Sieg!
Vorwärts!
Flieg’, Adler, flieg’!
Victoria!
Victoria!
Mit uns ist Gott!”
Terrified, turning her head from side to side, Lorraine stretched out her hands. She tried to speak, but her ears were filled with the deep voices shouting the splendid battle-hymn —
“Fly, Eagle! fly!
With us is God!”
She crept out of bed, her bare feet white with cold, her bare arms flushed and burning. Blinded by the blaze of the rising sun, she felt her way around the room, calling, “Jack! Jack!” The window was open; she crept to it. The street was a surging, scintillating torrent of steel.
“God with us!”
The White Cuirassiers shook their glittering sabres; the melancholy trumpet’s blast swept skyward; the standards flapped. Suddenly the stony street trembled with the outcrash of drums; the cuirassiers halted, the steel-mailed squadrons parted right and left; a carriage drove at a gallop through the opened ranks. Lorraine leaned from the window; the officer in the carriage looked up.
As the fallen Emperor’s eyes met Lorraine’s, she stretched out both little bare arms and cried: “Vive la France!” — and he was gone to his captivity, the White Cuirassiers galloping on every side.
The Sister of Mercy opened the door behind, calling her.
“He is dying,” she said. “He is in here. Come quickly!”
Lorraine turned her head. Her eyes were sweet and serene, her whole pale face transfigured.
“He will live,” she said. “I am here.”
“It is the pest!” muttered the Sister.
Lorraine glided into the hall and unclosed the door of the silent room.
He opened his eyes.
“There is no death!” she whispered, her face against his. “There is neither death nor sorrow nor dying.”
The clamour in the street died out; the wind was still; the pest flag under the window hung motionless.
He sighed; his eyes closed.
She stretched out beside him, her body against his, her bare arms around his neck.
His heart fluttered; stopped; fluttered; was silent; moved once again; ceased.
“Jack!”
Again his heart stirred — or was it her own?
When the morning sun broke over the ramparts of Sedan she fell asleep in his arms, lulled by the pulsations of his heart.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE PROPHECY OF LORRAINE
WHEN THE VICOMTE and Madame de Morteyn arrived in Sedan from Brussels the last of the French prisoners had been gone a week; the foul city was swept clean; the corpse-choked river no longer flung its dead across the shallows of the island of Glaires; the canal was untroubled by the ghastly freight of death that had collected like logs on a boom below the village of Iges.
All day the tramp of Prussian patrols echoed along the stony streets; all day the sinister outburst of the hoarse Bavarian bugles woke the echoes behind the ramparts. Red Cross flags drooped in the sunshine from churches, from banks, from every barrack, every depot, every public building. The pest flags waved gaily over the Asylum and the little Museum. A few appeared along the Avenue Philippoteaux, others still fluttered on the Gothic church and the convent across the Viaduc de Torcy. Three miles away the ruins of the village of Bazeilles lay in the bright September sunshine. Bavarian soldiers in greasy corvée lumbered among the charred chaos searching for their dead.
The plain of Illy, the heights of La Moncelle, Daigny, Givonne, and Frénois were vast cemeteries. Dredging was going on along the river, whither the curious small boys of Sedan betook themselves and stayed from morning till night watching the recovering of rusty sabres, bayonets, rifles, cannon, and often more grewsome flotsam. It was probably the latter that drew the small boys like flies; neither the one nor the other are easily glutted with horrors.
The silver trumpets of the Saxon Riders were chorusing the noon call from the Porte de Paris when a long train crept into the Sedan station and pulled up in the sunshine, surrounded by a cordon of Hanover Riflemen. One by one the passengers passed into the station, where passports were shown and apathetic commissaires took charge of the baggage.
There were no hacks, no conveyances of any kind, so the tall, white-bearded gentleman in black, who stood waiting anxiously for his passport, gave his arm to an old lady, heavily veiled, and bowed down with the sudden age that great grief brings. Beside her walked a young girl, also in deep mourning.
A man on crutches directed them to the Place Turenne, hobbling after them to murmur his thanks for the piece of silver the girl slipped into his hands.
“The number on the house is 31,” he repeated; “the pest flag is no longer outside.”
“The pest?” murmured the old man under his breath.
At that moment a young girl came out of the crowded station, looking around her anxiously.
“Lorraine!” cried the white-haired man.
She was in his arms before he could move. Madame de Morteyn clung to her, too, sobbing convulsively; Dorothy hid her face in her black-edged handkerchief.
After a moment Lorraine stepped back, drying her sweet eyes. Dorothy kissed her again and again.
“I — I don’t see why we should cry,” said Lorraine, while the tears ran down her flushed cheeks. “If he had died it would have been different.”
After a silence she said again:
“You will see. We are not unhappy — Jack and I. Monsieur Grahame came yesterday with Rickerl, who is doing very well.”
“Rickerl here, too?” whispered Dorothy.
Lorraine slipped an arm through hers, looking back at the old people.
“Come,” she said, serenely, “Jack is able to sit up.” Then in Dorothy’s ear she whispered, “I dare not tell them — you must.”
“Dare not tell them—”
“That — that I married Jack — this morning.”
The girls’ arms pressed each other.
German officers passed and repassed, rigid, supercilious, staring at the young girls with that half-sneering, half-impudent, near-sighted gaze peculiar to the breed. Their insolent eyes, however, dropped before the clear, mild glance of the old vicomte.
His face was furrowed by care and grief, but he held his white head high and stepped with an elasticity that he had not known in years. Defeat, disaster, sorrow, could not weaken him; he was of the old stock, the real beau-sabreur, a relic of the old régime, that grew young in the face of defeat, that died of a broken heart at the breath of dishonour. There had been no dishonour, as he understood it — there had been defeat, bitter defeat. That was part of his trade, to face defeat nobly, courteously, chivalrously; to bow with a smile on his lips to the more skilful adversary who had disarmed him.
Bitterness he knew, when the stiff Prussian officers clanked past along the sidewalk of this French city; despair he never dreamed of. As for dishonour — that is the cry of the pack, the refuge of the snarling mob yelping at the bombastic vociferations of some mean-souled demagogue; and in Paris there were many, and the pack howled in the Republic at the crack of the lash.
“Lady Hesketh is here, too,” said Lorraine. “She appears to be a little reconciled to her loss. Dorothy, it breaks my heart to see Rickerl. He lies in his room all day, silent, ghastly white. He does not believe that Alixe — did what she did — and died there at Morteyn. Oh, I am glad you are here. Jack says you must tell Rickerl nothing about Sir Thorald; nobody is to know that — now all is ended.”
“Yes,” said Dorothy.
When they came to the house, Archibald Grahame and Lady Hesketh met them at the door. Molly Hesketh had wept a great deal at first. She wept still, but more moderately.
“My angel child!” she said, taking Dorothy to her bosom. Grahame took off his hat.
The old people hurried to Jack’s room above; Dorothy, guided by Lorraine, hastened to Rickerl; Archibald Grahame looked genially at Molly and said:
“Now don’t, Lady Hesketh — I beg you won’t. Try to be cheerful. We must find something to divert you.”
“I don’t wish to,” said Molly.
“There is a band concert this afternoon in the Place Turenne,” suggested Grahame.
“I’ll never go,” said Molly; “I haven’t anything fit to wear.”
In the room above, Madame de Morteyn sat with Jack’s hand in hers, smiling through her tears. The old vicomte stood beside her, one arm clasping Lorraine’s slender waist.
“Children! children! wicked ones!” he repeated, “how dare you marry each other like two little heathen?”
“It comes, my dear, from your having married an American wife,” said Madame de Morteyn, brushing away the tears; “they do those things in America.”
“America!” grumbled the vicomte, perfectly delighted— “a nice country for young savages. Lorraine, you at least should have known better.”
“I did,” said Lorraine; “I ought to have married Jack long ago.”
The vicomte was speechless; Jack laughed and pressed his aunt’s hands.
They spoke of Morteyn, of their hope that one day they might rebuild it. They spoke, too, of Paris, cuirassed with steel, flinging defiance to the German floods that rolled towards the walls from north, south, west, and east.
