Lorraine Part 24

"Did you see wolves here?" asked Georges.

"Yes; before war was declared. I told Monsieur Marche--it is a legend of our country. He, of course, laughed at it. I also do not believe everything I am told--but--I don't know--I have alway believed that, ever since I was, oh, very, very small--like that."

She held one small gloved hand about twelve inches from the floor of the cart.

"At such a height and such an age it is natural to believe anything," said Jack. "I, too, accepted many strange doctrines then."

"You are laughing again," said Lorraine.

So they pa.s.sed through the forest, trying to be cheerful, even succeeding at times. But Georges' face grew paler every minute, and his smile was so painful that Lorraine could not bear it and turned her head away, her hand tightening on the box-rail alongside.

As they were about to turn out into the Morteyn road, where the forest ended, Jack suddenly checked the horse and rose to his feet.

"What is it?" asked Lorraine. "Oh, I see! Oh, look!"

The Morteyn road was filled with infantry, solid, plodding columns, pressing fast towards the west. The fields, too, were black with men, engineers, weighted down with their heavy equipments, resting in long double rows, eyes vacant, heads bent.

Above the thickets of rifles sweeping past, mounted officers sat in their saddles, as though carried along on the surface of the serried tide. Standards fringed with gold slanted in the last rays of the sun, sabres glimmered, curving upward from the thronged rifles, and over all sounded the shuffle, shuffle of worn shoes in the dust, a mournful, monotonous cadence, a hopeless measure, whose burden was despair, whose beat was the rhythm of breaking hearts.

Oh, but it cut Lorraine to see their boyish faces, dusty, gaunt, hollow-eyed, turn to her and turn away without a change, without a shade of expression. The mask of blank apathy stamped on every visage almost terrified her. On they came, on, on, and still on, under a forest of shining rifles. A convoy of munitions crowded in the rear of the column, surrounded by troopers of the train-des-equipages; then followed more infantry, then cavalry, dragoons, who sat listlessly in their high saddles, carbines bobbing on their broad backs, whalebone plumes matted with dust.

Georges rose painfully from his seat, stepped to the side, and climbed down into the road. He felt in the breast of his dolman for the packet, adjusted his sabre, and turned to Lorraine.

"There is a squadron of the Remount Cavalry over in that meadow--I can get a horse there," he said. "Thank you, Jack.

Good-by, Mademoiselle de Nesville, you have been more than generous."

"You can have a horse from the Morteyn stables," said Jack; "my dear fellow, I can't bear to see you go--to think of your riding to Metz to-night."

"It's got to be done, you know," said Georges. He bowed; Lorraine stretched out her hand and he gravely touched it with his fingers. Then he exchanged a nervous gripe with Jack, and turned away hurriedly, crowding between the pa.s.sing dragoons, traversing the meadows until they lost him in the throng.

"We cannot get to the house by the road," said Jack; "we must take the stable path;" and he lifted the reins and turned the horse's head.

The stable road was narrow, and crossed with sprays of tender leaves. The leaves touched Lorraine's eyes, they rubbed across her fair brow, robbing her of single threads of glittering hair, they brushed a single bright tear from her cheeks and held it, glimmering like a drop of dew.

"Behold the end of the world," said Lorraine--"I am weeping."

He turned and looked into her eyes.

"Is that strange?" he asked, gently.

"Yes; I have often wished to cry. I never could--except once before--and that was four days ago."

The day of their quarrel! He thrilled from head to foot, but dared not speak.

"Four days ago," said Lorraine again. She thought of herself gliding from her bed to seek the stable where Jack's horse stood, she thought of her hot face pressed to the wounded creature's neck. Then, suddenly aware of what she had confessed, she leaned back and covered her face with her hands.

"Lorraine!" he whispered, brokenly.

But they were already at the Chateau.

"Lorraine, my child!" cried Madame de Morteyn, leaning from the terrace. Her voice was drowned in the crash of drums rolling, rolling, from the lawn below, and the trumpets broke out in harsh chorus, shrill, discordant, terrible.

The Emperor had arrived at Morteyn.

XIV

THE MARQUIS MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE

The Emperor dined with the Vicomte and Madame de Morteyn that evening in the great dining-room. The Chateau, patrolled by doubled guards of the Cent Gardes, was surrounded by triple hedges of bayonets and a perfect pest of police spies, secret agents, and flunkys. In the breakfast-room General Frossard and his staff were also dining; and up-stairs, in a small gilded salon, Jack and Lorraine ate soberly, tenderly cared for by the old house-keeper.

Outside they could hear the steady tramp of pa.s.sing infantry along the dark road, the clank of artillery, and the m.u.f.fled trample of cavalry. Frossard's Corps was moving rapidly, its back to the Rhine.

"I saw the Prince Imperial," said Jack; "he was in the conservatory, writing to his mother, the Empress. Have you ever seen him, Mademoiselle de Nesville? He is young, really a mere child, but he looks very manly in his uniform. He has that same charm, that same delicate, winning courtesy that the Emperor is famous for. But he looks so pale and tired--like a school-boy in the Lycee."

"It would have been unfortunate if the Emperor had stopped at the Chateau de Nesville," said Lorraine, sipping her small gla.s.s of Moselle; "papa hates him."

"Many Royalists do."

"It is not that only; there is something else--something that I don't know about. It concerns my brother who died many years ago, before I was born. Have I never spoken of my brother? Has papa never said anything?"

"No," said Jack, gently.

"Well, when my brother was alive, our family lived in Paris. That is all I know, except that my brother died shortly before the empire was proclaimed, and papa and mamma came to our country-place here, where I was born. Rene's--my brother's--death had something to do with my father's hatred of the empire, I know that. But papa will never speak of it to me, except to tell me that I must always remember that the Emperor has been the curse of the De Nesvilles.

Hark! Hear the troops pa.s.sing. Why do they never cheer their Emperor?"

"They cheered him at Saarbruck--I heard them. You are not eating; are you tired?"

"A little. I shall go with Marianne, I think; I am sleepy. Are you going to sit up? Do you think we can sleep with the noise of the horses pa.s.sing? I should like to see the Emperor at table."

"Wait," said Jack; "I'll go down and find out whether we can't slip into the ballroom."

"Then I'll go too," said Lorraine, rising. "Marianne, stay here; I will return in a moment;" and she slipped after Jack, down the broad staircase and out to the terrace, where a huge cuira.s.sier officer stood in the moonlight, his straight sabre shimmering, his white mantle open over the silver breastplate.

The ballroom was brilliantly lighted, the gilded canapes and chairs were covered with officers in every conceivable uniform, lounging, sprawling, chatting, and gesticulating, or pulling papers and maps over the floor. A general traced routes across the map at his feet with the point of a naked sword; an officer of dragoons, squatting on his haunches, followed the movement of the sword-point and chewed an unlighted cigarette. Officers were coming and going constantly, entering by the hallway and leaving through the door-like windows that swung open to the floor. The sinister face of a police-spy peered into the conservatory at intervals, where a slender, pale-faced boy sat, clothed in a colonel's uniform, writing on a carved table. It was the Prince Imperial, back from Saarbruck and his "baptism of fire," back also from the Spicheren and the disaster of Worth. He was writing to his mother, that unhappy, anxious woman who looked every day from the Tuileries into the streets of a city already clamorous, already sullenly suspicious of its Emperor and Empress.

The boy's face was beautiful. He raised his head and sat silently biting his pen, eyes wandering. Perhaps he was listening to the retreat of Frossard's Corps through the fair province of Lorraine--a province that he should never live to see again. A few months more, a few battles, a few villages in flames, a few cities ravaged, a few thousand corpses piled from the frontier to the Loire--and then, what? Why, an emperor the less and an emperor the more, and a new name for a province--that is all.

His delicate, high-bred face fell; he shaded his sad eyes with one thin hand and wrote again--all that a good son writes to a mother, all that a good soldier writes to a sovereign, all that a good prince writes to an empress.

"Oh, what sad eyes!" whispered Lorraine; "he is too young to see such things."

"He may see worse," said Jack. "Come, shall we walk around the lawn to the dining-room?"

They descended the dark steps, her arm resting lightly on his, and he guided her through a throng of gossiping cavalrymen and hurrying but polite officers towards the western wing of the Chateau, the trample of the pa.s.sing army always in their ears.

As he was about to cross the drive, a figure stepped from the shadow of the porte-cochere--a man in a rough tweed suit, who lifted his wide-awake politely and asked Jack if he was not English.