Lorraine Part 31

G.o.d alone knows why he gave to France, in the supreme moment of her need, the beings who filled heaven with the wind of their lungs and brought her to her knees in shame--not for brave men dead in vain, not for a wasted land, scourged and flame-shrunken from the Rhine to the Loire, not for provinces lost nor cities gone forever--but for the strange creatures that her agony brought forth, shapes simian and weird, all mouth and convulsive movement, little pigmy abortions mouthing and playing antics before high Heaven while the land ran blood in every furrow and the world was a h.e.l.l of flame.

Gambetta, that incubus of bombastic flabbiness, roaring prophecy and plat.i.tude through the dismayed city, kept his eye on the balcony of the particular edifice where, later, he should pose as an animated Jericho trumpet. So, biding his time, he bellowed, but it was the Comedie Francaise that was the loser, not the people, when he sailed away in his balloon, posed, squatting majestically as the G.o.d of war above the clouds of battle. And little Thiers, furtive, timid, delighting in senile efforts to stir the ferment of chaos till it boiled, he, too, was there, owl-like, squeaky-voiced, a true "Bombyx a Lunettes." There, too, was Hugo--often ridiculous in his terrible moods, egotistical, sloppy, roaring. The Empire pinched Hugo, and he roared; and let the rest of the world judge whether, under such circ.u.mstances, there was majesty in the roar. The spectacle of Hugo, prancing on the ramparts and hurling bad names at the German armies, recalls the persistent but painful manuvres of a lion with a flea. Both are terribly in earnest--neither is sublime.

Jack sat leaning on the window-ledge, his chin on both hands, watching the moonlight rippling across the sea of steel below.

Lorraine, also silent, buried in an arm-chair, lay huddled somewhere in the shadows, looking up at the stars, scarcely visible in the radiance of the moon.

After a while she spoke in a low voice: "Do you remember in chapel a week ago--what--"

"Yes, I know what you mean. Can you say it--any of it?"

"Yes, all."

Presently he heard her voice in the darkness repeating the splendid lines:

"'In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and they that look out of the windows be darkened.

"'And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and they shall rise up at the voice of a bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low.

"'Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fear shall be in the way, and the almond-tree shall flourish, and the gra.s.shopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.

"'Because man goeth to his long home--'"

Her voice broke a little.

"'And the mourners go about the streets--'"

He leaned forward, his hand stretched out in the shadows. After a moment her fingers touched his, moved a little, and were clasped close. Then it was that, in her silence, he read a despair too deep, too sudden, too stupefying for expression--a despair scarcely yet understood. A sensitive young mind, stunned by realities never dreamed of, recovers slowly; and the first outward evidence of returning comprehension is an out-stretched hand, a groping in the shadows for the hand of the best beloved.

Her hand was there, out-stretched, their fingers had met and interlaced. A great la.s.situde weighed her down, mind and body.

Yesterday was so far away, and to-morrow so close at hand, but not yet close enough to arouse her from an apathy unpierced as yet by the keen shaft of grief.

He felt the lethargy in her yielding fingers; perhaps he began to understand the sensitive girl lying in the arm-chair beside him, perhaps he even saw ahead into the future that promised everything or nothing, for France, for her, for him.

Madame de Morteyn came to take her away, but before he dropped her hand in the shadows he felt a pressure that said, "Wait!"--so he waited, there alone in the darkness.

The bells of Saint-Lys sounded again, scarcely vibrating in the still air; a bank of sombre cloud buried the moon, and put out the little stars one by one until the blackness of the night crept in, blotting out river and tree and hill, hiding the silent camp in fathomless shadow. He slept.

When he awoke, slowly, confused and uncertain, he found her close to him, kneeling on the floor, her face on his knees. He touched her arm, fearfully, scarcely daring; he touched her hair, falling heavily over her face and shoulders and across his knees. Ah!

but she was tired--her very soul was weary and sick; and she was too young to bear her trouble. Therefore she came back to him who had reached out his hand to her. She could not cry--she could only lie there and try to live through the bitterness of her solitude. For now she knew at last that she was alone on earth.

The knowledge had come in a moment, it had come with the first trample of the Prussian hors.e.m.e.n; she knew that her love, given so wholly, so pa.s.sionately, was nothing, had been nothing, to her father. He whom she lived for--was it possible that he could abandon her in such an hour? She had waited all day, all night; she said in her heart that he would come from his machines and his turret to be with her. Together they could have lived through the shame of the day--of the bitter days to come; together they could have suffered, knowing that they had each other to live for.

But she could not face the Prussian scourge alone--she could not.

These two truths had been revealed to her with the first tap of the Prussian drums: that every inch of soil, every gra.s.s-blade, every pebble of her land was dearer to her than life; and that her life was nothing to her father. He who alone in all the world could have stood between her and the shameful pageant of invasion, who could have taught her to face it, to front it n.o.bly, who could have bidden her hope and pray and wait--he sat in his turret turning little wheels while the whole land shook with the throes of invasion--their native land, Lorraine.

The death-throes of a nation are felt by all the world. Bismarck placed a steel-clad hand upon the pulse of France, and knew Lorraine lay dying. Amputation would end all--Moltke had the apparatus ready; Bismarck, the great surgeon and greater executioner, sat with mailed hand on the pulse of France and waited.

The girl, Lorraine, too, knew the crisis had come--sensitive prophetess in all that she held sacred! She had never prayed for the Emperor, but she always prayed for France when she asked forgiveness night and morning. At confession she had accused herself sometimes because she could not understand the deeper meaning of this daily prayer, but now she understood it; the fierce love for native soil that blazes up when that soil is stamped upon and spurned.

All the devotion, all the tender adoration, that she had given her father turned now to bitter grief for this dear land of hers. It, at least, had been her mother, her comforter, her consolation; and there it lay before her--it called to her; she responded pa.s.sionately, and gave it all her love. So she lay there in the dark, her hot face buried in her hands, close to one whom she needed and who needed her.

He was too wise to speak or move; he loved her too much to touch again the hair, flung heavily across her face--to touch her flushed brow, her clasped hands, her slender body, delicate and warm, firm yet yielding. He waited for the tears to come. And when they fell, one by one, great, hot drops, they brought no relief until she told him all--all--her last and inmost hope and fear.

Then when her white soul lay naked in all its innocence before him, and when the last word had been said, he raised her head and searched in her pure eyes for one message of love for himself.

It was not there; and the last word had been said.

And, even as he looked, holding her there almost in his arms, the Prussian trumpets clanged from the dim meadows and the drums thundered on the hills, and the invading army roused itself at the dawn of another day.

XVIII

THE STRETCHING OF NECKS

For two days and nights the German army pa.s.sed through Morteyn and Saint-Lys, on the march towards Metz. All day long the hills struck back the echoes of their flat bra.s.s drums, and shook with the shock of armed squadrons, tramping on into the west.

Interminable trains of wagons creaked along the sandy Saint-Avold road; the whistle of the locomotive was heard again at Saint-Lys, where the Bavarians had established a base of supplies and were sending their endless, multicoloured trains puffing away towards Saarbruck for provisions and munitions of war that had arrived there from Cologne. Generals with their staffs, serious, civil fellows, with anxious, near-sighted eyes, stopped at the Chateau and were courteously endured, only to be replaced by others equally polite and serious. And regularly, after each batch left with their marching regiments, there came back to the Chateau by courier, the same evening, a packet of visiting-cards and a polite letter signed by all the officers entertained, thanking the Vicomte and Madame de Morteyn for their hospitality.

At last, on the 10th of August, about five o'clock in the afternoon, the last squadron of the rear-guard cantered over the hills west of Morteyn, and the last straggling Uhlan followed after, twirling his long lance.

Every day Lorraine had watched and waited for one word from her father; every day Jack had ridden over to the Chateau de Nesville, but the marquis refused to see him or to listen to any message, nor did he send any to Lorraine.

Old Pierre told Jack that no Germans had visited the Chateau; that the marquis was busy all day with his machinery, and never left his turret except to eat at daylight in the grand salon below. He also intimated that his master was about ready to make another ascension in the new balloon, which, old Pierre affirmed, had a revolving screw at either side of the wicker car, like a ship; and, like a ship, it could be steered with perfect ease. He even took Jack to a little stone structure that stood in a meadow, surrounded by trees. In there, according to Pierre, stood this marvellous balloon, not yet inflated, of course. That was only a matter of five seconds; a handful of the silver dust placed at the aperture of the silken bag, a drop of pure water touched to it, and, puff! the silver dust turns to vapour and the balloon swells out tight and full.

Jack had peeped into the barred window and had seen the wicker car of the balloon standing on the cement floor, filled with the folded silken covering for the globe of the balloon. He could just make out, on either side of the car, two twisted twin screws, wrought out of some dull oxidized metal. On returning to Morteyn that evening he had told Lorraine.

She explained that the screws were made of a metal called aluminum, rare then, because so difficult to extract from its combining substances, and almost useless on account of its being impossible to weld. Her father, however, had found a way to utilize it--how, she did not know. If this ascension proved a success the French government would receive the balloon and the secret of the steering and propelling gear, along with the formula for the silvery dust used to inflate it. Even she understood what a terrible engine of war such an aerial ship might be, from which two men could blow up fortress after fortress and city after city when and where they chose. Armies could be annihilated, granite and steel would be as tinder before a bomb or torpedo of picric acid dropped from the clouds.

On the 10th of August, a little after five o'clock, Jack left Lorraine on the terrace at Morteyn to try once more to see the marquis--for Lorraine's sake.

He turned to the west, where the last Uhlan of the rear-guard was disappearing over the brow of the hill, brandishing his pennoned lance-tip in the late rays of the low-hanging sun.

"Good-by," he said, smiling up at her from the steps. "Don't worry, please don't. Remember your father is well, and is working for France."

He spoke of the marquis as her father; he always should as long as she lived. He said, too, that the marquis was labouring for France. So he was; but France would never see the terrible war engine, nor know the secrets of its management, as long as Napoleon III. was struggling to keep his family in the high places of France.

"Good-by," he said again. "I shall be back by sundown."

Lorraine leaned over the terrace, looking down at him with blue, fathomless eyes.

"By sundown?"

"Yes."

"Truly?"

"Yes."