The Great White Army Part 7

II

The story begins with a woman, as it began aforetime when we entered the city.

There had been three days of beautiful weather when we of the Guard rode in fine spirits toward our own country and gave no thought but to the plunder we were carrying out of Russia.

I myself had many a good thing in the wagon, and I remember well a great gold plate set with diamonds, which had been torn from Ivan's Cross when we tried to pull it down from the cathedral in the Kremlin.

The men themselves were loaded with pretty trinkets, and carried furs enough to clothe Paris. The costliest skins--ermine and sable and lion and bear--were used for every conceivable purpose; and it is no wonder that the army was followed by thousands of Jews, waiting to buy these treasures when their owners should be weary of them.

Truly would I say that such a scene as our exit from Moscow was never written before in the story of warfare, nor will ever be written again.

Imagine a great white wooded plain, a sandy road at the heart of it, and upon this road an interminable procession of carts and wagons to carry the baggage of the Grand Army.

Upon either side in the fields go cavalry and infantry, every man's knapsack packed with loot, the commonest troopers sucking the rarest liqueurs from costly bottles, the poorest fellows smoking pipes with bowls of gold and tobacco that only princes should have been able to afford. All was hope and gaiety. Paris lay twelve hundred leagues from us, yet to Paris and our homes we were going. Who shall wonder if the trumpets blew a merry blast and the bands set our feet dancing?

Was not the Emperor in our midst, and should we not return in a blaze of glory?

In such content we marched for three days. There was not much discipline observed, and the men were permitted to go pretty well as they pleased, it being always understood that the dreaded Cossacks were on our flank and that any foolhardiness might bring a disaster upon us.

This kept the stragglers more or less in touch with the main body of the army; but sometimes we officers would ride away into the woods to see what kind of hospitality we could find at a country house and to enjoy it according to our opportunities.

It was on such an occasion that Leon and I first met Zayde, and came near to losing our lives because of her. I must tell you of this before going on to speak of the other days which followed, when the north wind began to blow and all that wide landscape lay under its veil of the cruel snow.

We had been riding through a shady wood about a mile from the high road to Smolensk. Someone had discovered that there was a famous old monastery in the district noted for its hospitality; and although we expected little from any Russian monk, we were quite able to help ourselves should the opportunity be offered. This quest carried us farther and farther away from our comrades, until at last we appeared to have lost the road altogether, and to be as far away from any monastery as ever we were in all our lives. My own thought was for going back immediately, but the younger head would hear nothing of it, and my nephew protested loudly that I was becoming a coward.

"It is the good living in Moscow that has destroyed your nerve, uncle,"

said he. "How could we be better off than we are in this place? Soft gra.s.s to gallop on, shady trees above, and the sun shining as though it were mid-summer in our own France. We shall come to the monastery presently, and they will give us wine that Adam brewed. There will be plenty of loot to add to our saddle-bags, and perhaps there will be sisters to comfort us. Why should we go back? The road is over there any time we have a fancy to rejoin it."

I retorted by reminding him that the Cossacks were out, and that we might encounter them at any time. More than once I thought that I heard a distant sound of galloping, and I drew rein to call his attention to it. But he would not listen to me, and still riding southwards, as it seemed, he pulled up at length and cried in real astonishment:

"Why, uncle, what did I tell you? Here is Cleopatra herself and her treasures with her, as I am alive!"

I came up to him and saw what had arrested his attention. There was a deep pit before us and in it a Cossack and a woman. The former sprang up at our coming, and drawing a pistol from his belt, he snapped it at Leon's head. Happily the powder did not fire, and seeing that we were two to one, the fellow hurled the weapon at my nephew's horse and immediately bolted for the shelter of the woods.

So we were alone with the lady and her treasure, and this, at a modest estimate, must have been worth half a million of francs.

III

I have never seen such riches spread in a green wood before, nor am I likely to do so if I live to a hundred years.

Consisting of jewels chiefly, there were other objects there and all precious beyond words.

Great ropes of Eastern pearls, diamonds and emeralds; Indian images in solid gold; the most wonderful robes of ermine and sable; jewelled scabbards that should have come from Damascus--all these lay littered upon the gra.s.s by the side of the impa.s.sive woman, who now looked at us with the eyes of a child and uttered no word either of protest or of appeal.

Certainly she was a remarkably beautiful creature.

Not more than seventeen years of age, she had hair as golden as the sands of the sea, the white skin of the Circa.s.sian and the dark eyes of the Persian beauty.

Her dress was an odd compromise between the East and the West.

She had baggy breeches of blue silk, high riding-boots of Russian leather, a white and gold coat to her waist, and the kepi of the Austrian hussar. Over all she wore a superb cloak of ermine which would have brought a fortune could it have been sold in our own Paris.

Such was the apparition which confronted us in that lonely wood.

Needless to say that we were both greatly moved by it; Leon chiefly, I fear, by the girl's big eyes; I by the wonders of the treasure which lay about her. To go down into the pit and to introduce ourselves was the work of an instant. Leon told her briefly that he was a French officer, and he begged leave to protect her. To this she answered not a word; but I could see that she was not displeased, and presently with a child's laugh she dragged him down beside her.

I know Leon so well, and have seen so many women fall a victim to his pleasing airs that this act did not surprise me as much as it should have done. None the less, I was astonished when presently the girl bade me sit also, and turning to one of the great bags beside her, she produced food and wine and set it before us.

The odd thing was that she could not speak a word of any language with which we tried her.

Of Russian I had learned a few sentences during our stay in Moscow, and German I spoke with some fluency; but neither the one nor the other was the slightest use; nor, need I say, had she any French. Thus we came to signs and mouthing, in which my nephew appeared to be so proficient that he was kissing her within twenty minutes of the encounter and hugging her like a bear before the meal was done.

Well, we finished the meal, and then, pointing to the wood, indicated to the girl that we must go. She had tried to tell us her name, which we made out to be something like Zoida or Zayde, and we asked her as well as we could to accompany us on our road and let us help her with the treasure. The astonishing thing was that she appeared almost indifferent to the existence of the latter, laughing like a child when we pointed to it, and throwing the diamonds about as though they had been pebbles. This angered me, for I saw the worth of the stuff; and presently, speaking in a wrathful tone, I commanded her to pack the things in the box from which they had been taken and to follow us. The new turn appeared to alarm her not a little, and she sat crouching there like a frightened gnome while Leon and I put the things in their cases and began to pack them upon our horses. How they came to be in that remote wood we knew no more than the dead; but it would clearly have been a crime to leave them there, and indeed we had not gone many paces upon the road before the secret of their presence was discovered.

There was at an open glade of the forest a kind of amphitheatre crossed by a road to some southern town.

A wrecked coach stood at the junction, and all about it were the signs of a b.l.o.o.d.y combat.

I had been riding before the others at this particular moment, and my horse nearly stumbled over the body of an elderly man who had been shot in the head and his brains blown out. Near by lay his coachman, stabbed in many places and quite dead. Of the horses of the coach there was not a trace, and it was now plain to me that the treasure had come from it, and that this elderly man had been escaping southward when the robbers overtook him. Naturally I turned to the girl and began to question her angrily. She merely shook her head and shut her eyes, as though afraid to look upon the corpse. It was to say that she had had no hand in that b.l.o.o.d.y affair, and so much I could readily believe.

"Good heavens!" said I to Leon, "what an infamy, and more than that, what a mystery!"

He did not agree with me at all. A ready instinct told him what had happened.

"The carriage stuck in the sand yonder," said he. "The servants went for horses to a neighbouring farm. This girl here may have been with them as a servant or she may not. The fellow who murdered them was the one we found with her in the wood. It is as simple as an open book, my dear uncle."

"Then," said I, "we will write the end of the story. Of course we must wait until the others return."

"What?" cried he; "with the night coming down and the Cossacks in the woods! That would be madness indeed, my uncle."

And then he added with a laugh, "The old gentleman is in heaven and is in no need of diamonds. We shall know very well what to do with them when we get in Paris. Let us make haste before we are discovered."

He did not wait for me to reply, but holding the girl close to him on the saddle he trotted on through the wood, and I followed him reluctantly.

We were as rich as Croesus, yet how we were going to get out of the forest, where we should find the army, or what chance we had of carrying our treasure to Paris, I knew no more than the dead.

IV

The way now lay through a wide avenue--one of the most beautiful I had seen in Russia. The gra.s.s lay smooth and green, and bore no trace of the relentless summer. We might have been in the precincts of some princely chateau, and we were not at all surprised presently when we came upon a considerable building which had all the air of one of those picturesque monasteries in which Russia abounds. Had we any doubt of this, a great gilt dome with a Greek cross high above it would have settled it; for never have I seen a more beautiful object than this golden ball glistening amid the woods as though its heart were of fire, while a celestial radiance shone all about it. To Leon, however, it merely stood for a place whereat we might get food and drink.

"These monks are very decent fellows," he said; "they know how to entertain strangers. The regiment will bivouac not far from here, and we may just as well stay the night in yonder building as sleep in a mouldy barn. Cheer up, uncle, and think of the good wine you are about to drink. It's the luckiest thing that could have happened to us."

I looked at the girl in his arms and wondered if he spoke truly.

We were now within a quarter of a mile of the building and could see a portcullis and a gate from which men on horseback were riding out.

When they approached nearer it was plain that they were the servants of the dead man whose body lay in the woods behind us; and observing this we drew aside behind the trees to let them pa.s.s. It was evident that they had told the story of their trouble to the good monks in yonder building; and some of the latter, clad in brown habits with white cords about their waists, were going down to their a.s.sistance.

I noticed that the servants were five in number and were all heavily armed. Obviously they must have been men of little sense to have left their master alone with a bandit in such a place and so to have contributed to his death. The same idea occurred to Leon, who did not fail to point out to me the nature of the peril from which he had saved the girl, who now lay trembling in his arms.