The Maids of Paradise Part 13

The booming of the guns was unbroken, as steady and sustained as the eternal roar of a cataract. At moments I believed that I could distinguish the staccato crashes of platoon firing, but could not be certain in the swelling din.

As I lay there on my long, cushioned chair, burning with that insatiable thirst which, to thoroughly appreciate, one must be wounded, the door opened and a Turco soldier came into the room and advanced toward me on tip-toe.

He wore full uniform, was fully equipped, crimson chechia, snowy gaiters, and terrible sabre-bayonet.

I beckoned him, and the tall, bronzed fellow came up, smiling, showing his snowy, pointed teeth under a crisp beard.

"Water, Mustapha," I motioned with stiffened lips, and the good fellow unslung his blue water-bottle and set it to my burning mouth.

"Merci, mon brave!" I said. "May you dwell in Paradise with Ali, the fourth Caliph, the Lion of G.o.d!"

The Turco stared, muttered the Tekbir in a low voice, bent and kissed my hands.

"Were you once an officer of our African battalions?" he asked, in the Arab tongue.

"Sous-officier of spahi cavalry," I said, smiling. "And you are a Kabyle mountaineer from Constantine, I see."

"It is true as I recite the fatha," cried the great fellow, beaming on me. "We Kabyles love our officers and bear witness to the unity of G.o.d, too. I am a marabout, my inspector, Third Turcos, and I am anxious to have a Prussian ask me who were my seven ancestors."

The music of his long-forgotten tongue refreshed me; old scenes and memories of the camp at Oran, the never-to-be-forgotten cavalry with the scarlet cloaks, rushed on me thick and fast; incidents, trivial matters of the bazaars, faces of comrades dead, came to me in flashes. My eyes grew moist, my throat swelled, I whimpered:

"It is all very well, mon enfant, but I'm here with a hole in me stuffed full of lint, and you have your two good arms and as many legs with which to explain to the Prussians who your seven ancestors may be. Give me a drink, in G.o.d's name!"

Again he held up the blue water-bottle, saying, gravely: "We both worship the same G.o.d, my inspector, call Him what we will."

After a moment I said: "Is it a battle or a bousculade? But I need not ask; the cannon tell me enough. Are they storming the heights, Mustapha?"

"Macache comprendir," said the soldier, dropping into patois. "There is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we have seen nothing but sparrows."

I listened for a moment; the sound of the cannonade appeared to be steadily receding westward.

"It seems to me like retreat!" I said, sharply.

"Ritrite? Quis qui ci, ritrite?"

I looked at the simple fellow with tears in my eyes.

"You would not understand if I told you," said I. "Are you detailed to look after me?"

He said he was, and I informed him that I needed n.o.body; that it was much more important for everybody that he should rejoin his battalion in the street below, where even now I could hear the Algerian bugles blowing a silvery sonnerie--"Garde a vous!"

"I am Salah Ben-Ahmed, a marabout of the Third Turcos," he said, proudly, "and I have yet to explain to these Prussians who my seven ancestors were. Have I my inspector's permission to go?"

He was fairly trembling as the imperative clangor of the bugles rang through the street; his fine nostrils quivered, his eyes glittered like a cobra's.

"Go, Salah Ben-Ahmed, the marabout," said I, laughing.

The soldier stiffened to attention; his bronzed hand flew to his scarlet fez, and, "Salute! O my inspector!" he cried, sonorously, and was gone at a bound.

That breathless unrest which always seizes me when men are at one another's throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command after command was ringing out in the street below. "Forward!" shouted a resonant voice, and "Forward! forward! forward!" echoed the voices of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.

The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on their _toug_; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime--and nothing, save the immense monotone of the cannonade.

I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand, snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily b.u.t.toned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my shoulders, and cried, "Come in!"

A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my mind all recollection of the Countess de Va.s.sart since I had come to my senses under the surgeon's probe. But at the touch of her fingers on the door outside, I knew her--I was certain that it could be n.o.body but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world.

She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but when she saw me sitting there with eyes and nose all red and swollen from snivelling she set the bowl on a table and hurried to my side.

"What is it? Is the pain so dreadful?" she whispered.

"No--oh no. I'm only a fool, and quite hungry, madame."

She brought the broth and bread and a gla.s.s of the most exquisite wine I ever tasted--a wine that seemed to brighten the whole room with its liquid sunshine.

"Do you know where you are?" she asked, gravely.

"Oh yes--in Morsbronn."

"And in whose house, monsieur?"

"I don't know--" I glanced instinctively at the tarnished coronet on the canopy above the bed. "Do you know, Madame la Comtesse?"

"I ought to," she said, faintly amused. "I was born in this room. It was to this house that I desired to come before--my exile."

Her eyes softened as they rested first on one familiar object, then on another.

"The house has always been in our family," she said. "It was once one of those fortified farms in the times when every hamlet was a petty kingdom--like the King of Yvetot's domain. Doubtless the ancient Trecourts also wore cotton night-caps for their coronets."

"I remember now," said I, "a stone turret wedged in between two houses. Is this it?"

"Yes, it is all that is left of the farm. My ancestors built this crazy old row of houses for their tenants."

After a silence I said, "I wish I could look out of the window."

She hesitated. "I don't suppose it could harm you?"

"It will harm me if I don't," said I.

She went to the window and folded up the varnished blinds.

"How dreadful the cannonade is growing," she said. "Wait! don't think of moving! I will push you close to the window, where you can see."

The tower in which my room was built projected from the rambling row of houses, so that my narrow window commanded a view of almost the entire length of the street. This street comprised all there was of Morsbronn; it lay between a double rank of houses constructed of plaster and beams, and surmounted by high-pointed gables and slated or tiled roofs, so fantastic that they resembled steeples.

Down the street I could see the house that I had left twenty-four hours before, never dreaming what my journey to La Trappe held in store for me. One or two dismounted soldiers of the Third Hussars sat in the doorway, listening to the cannon; but, except for these listless troopers, a few nervous sparrows, and here and there a skulking peasant, slinking off with a load of household furniture on his back, the street was deserted.

Everywhere shutters had been put up, blinds closed, curtains drawn.

Not a shred of smoke curled from the chimneys of these deserted houses; the heavy gables cast sinister shadows over closed doors and gates barred and locked, and it made me think of an unseaworthy ship, prepared for a storm, so bare and battened down was this long, dreary commune, lying there in the August sun.