The Maids of Paradise Part 19

Even if you had taken the jewels from me, and had asked my forgiveness, I would have given it freely. But I could not be as I was, a comrade to you."

There was a silence. The Countess, looking perfectly miserable, still gazed at Buckhurst. He dropped his gray, symmetrical head, yet I felt that he was listening to every minute sound in the room.

"You must not care what I say," she said. "I am only an unhappy woman, unused to the liberty I have given myself, not yet habituated to the charity of those blameless hearts which forgive everything! I am a novice, groping my way into a new and vast world, a limitless, generous, forgiving commune, where love alone dominates.... And if I had lived among my brothers long enough to be purged of those traditions which I have drawn from generations, I might now be n.o.ble enough and wise enough to say I do forgive and forget that you--"

"That you were once a thief," I ended, with the genial officiousness of the hopelessly fat-minded.

In the stillness I heard Buckhurst draw in his breath--once. Some day he would try to kill me for that; in the mean time my cra.s.s stupidity was no longer a question in his mind. I had hurt the Countess, too, with what she must have believed a fool's needless brutality. But it had to be so if I played at Jaques Bonhomme.

So I put the finishing whine to it--"Our Lord died between two thieves"--and relapsed into virtuous contemplation of my finger-tips.

"Madame," said Buckhurst, in a low voice, "your contempt of me is part of my penalty. I must endure it. I shall not complain. But I shall try to live a life that will at least show you my deep sincerity."

"I do not doubt it," said the Countess, earnestly. "Don't think that I mean to turn away from you or to push you away. There is nothing of the Pharisee in me. I would gladly trust you with what I have. I will consult you and advise with you, Mr. Buckhurst--"

"And ... despise me."

The unhappy Countess looked at me. It goes hard with a woman when her guide and mentor falls.

"If you return to Paradise, in Morbihan,... as we had planned, may I go," he asked, humbly, "only as an obscure worker in the cause? I beg, madame, that you will not cast me off."

So he wanted to go to Morbihan--to the village of Paradise? Why?

The Countess said: "I welcome all who care for the cause. You will never hear an unkind word from me if you desire to resume the work in Paradise. Dr. Delmont will be there; Monsieur Tavernier also, I hope; and they are older and wiser than I, and they have reached that lofty serenity which is far above my troubled mind. Ask them what you have asked of me; they are equipped to answer you."

It was time for another discord from me, so I said: "Madame, you have seen a thousand men lay down their lives for France. Has it not shaken your allegiance to that ghost of patriotism which you call the 'Internationale'?"

Here was food for thought, or rather fodder for a.s.ses--the Police Oracle turned missionary under the nose of the most cunning criminal in France and the vainest. Of course Buckhurst's contempt for me at once pa.s.sed all bounds, and, secure in that contempt, he felt it scarcely worth while to use his favorite weapon--persuasion. Still, if the occasion should require it, he was quite ready, I knew, to loose his eloquence on the Countess, and on me too.

The Countess turned her troubled eyes to me.

"What I have seen, what I have thought since yesterday has distressed me dreadfully," she said. "I have tried to include all the world in a broader pity, a broader, higher, and less selfish love than the jealous, single-minded love for one country--"

"The mother-land," I said, and Buckhurst looked up, adding, "The world is the true mother-land."

Whereupon I appeared profoundly impressed at such a novel and epigrammatic view.

"There is much to be argued on both sides," said the young Countess, "but I am utterly unfitted to struggle with this new code of ethics.

If it had been different--if I had been born among the poor, in misery!--But you see I come a pilgrim among the proletariat, clothed in conservatism, cloaked with tradition, and if at heart I burn with sorrow for the miserable, and if I gladly give what I have to help, I cannot with a single gesture throw off those inherited garments, though they tortured my body like the garment of Nessus."

I did not smile or respect her less for the stilted phrases, the pathetic poverty of metaphor. Profoundly troubled, struggling with a reserve the borders of which she strove so bravely to cross, her distress touched me the more because I knew it aroused the uneasy contempt of Buckhurst. Yet I could not spare her.

"You saw the cuira.s.siers die in the street below," I repeated, with the obstinacy of a limited intellect.

"Yes--and my heart went out to them," she replied, with an emphasis that pleased me and startled Buckhurst.

Buckhurst began to speak, but I cut him short.

"Then, madame, if your heart went out to the soldiers of France, it went out to France, too!"

"Yes--to France," she repeated, and I saw her lip begin to quiver.

"Wherein does love for France conflict with our creed, madame?" asked Buckhurst, gently. "It is only hate that we abjure."

She turned her gray eyes on him. "I will tell you: in that dreadful moment when the cavalry of France cheered Death in his own awful presence, I loved them and their country--_my_ country!--as I had never loved in all my life.... And I hated, too! I hated the men who butchered them--more!--I hated the country where the men came from; I hated race and country and the blows they dealt, and the evil they wrought on France--_my France_! That is the truth; and I realize it!"

There was a silence; Buckhurst slowly unrolled the wrinkled paper he had been fingering.

"And now?" he asked, simply.

"Now?" she repeated. "I don't know--truly, I do not know." She turned to me sorrowfully. "I had long since thought that my heart was clean of hate, and now I don't know." And, to Buckhurst, again: "Our creed teaches us that war is vile--a savage betrayal of humanity by a few dominant minds; a dishonorable ingrat.i.tude to G.o.d and country. But from that window I saw men die for honor of France with G.o.d's name on their lips. I saw one superb cuira.s.sier, trapped down there in the street, sit still on his horse, while they shot at him from every window, and I heard him call up to a Prussian officer who had just fired at him: 'My friend, you waste powder; the heart of France is cuira.s.sed by a million more like me!'" A rich flush touched her face; her gray eyes grew brighter.

"Is there a Frenchwoman alive whose blood would not stir at such a scene?" she said. "They shot him through his armor, his breastplate was riddled, he clung to his horse, always looking up at the riflemen, and I heard the bullets drumming on his helmet and his cuira.s.s like hailstones on a tin roof, and I could not look away. And all the while he was saying, quietly: 'It is quite useless, friends; France lives!

You waste your powder!' and I could not look away or close my eyes--"

She bent her head, shivering, and her interlocked fingers whitened.

"I only know this," she said: "I will give all I have--I will give my poor self to help the advent of that world-wide brotherhood which must efface national frontiers and end all war in this sad world. But if you ask me, in the presence of war, to look on with impartiality, to watch my own country battling for breath, to stop my ears when a wounded mother-land is calling, to answer the supreme cry of France with a pa.s.sionless cry, 'Repent!' I cannot do it--I will not! I was not born to!"

Deeply moved, she had risen, confronting Buckhurst, whose stone-cold eyes were fixed on her.

"You say I hold you unworthy," she said. "Others may hold me, too, unworthy because I have not reached that impartial equipoise whence, impa.s.sive, I can balance my native land against its sins and watch blind justice deal with it all unconcerned.

"In theory I have done it--oh, it is simple to teach one's soul in theory! But when my eyes saw my own land blacken and shrivel like a green leaf in the fire, and when with my own eyes I saw the best, the n.o.blest, the crown of my country's chivalry fall rolling in the mud of Morsbronn under the feet of Prussia, every drop of blood in my body was French--hot and red and French! And it is now; and it will always be--as it has always been, though I did not understand."

After a silence Buckhurst said: "All that may be, madame, yet not impair your creed."

"What!" she said, "does not hatred of the stranger impair my creed?"

"It will die out and give place to reason."

"When? When I attain the lofty, dispa.s.sionate level I have never attained? That will not be while this war endures."

"Who knows?" said Buckhurst, gently.

"I know!" replied the Countess, the pale flames in her cheeks deepening again.

"And yet," observed Buckhurst, patiently, "you are going to Paradise to work for the Internationale."

"I shall try to do my work and love France," she said, steadily. "I cannot believe that one renders the other impossible."

"Yet," said I, "if you teach the nation non-resistance, what would become of the armies of France?"

"I shall not teach non-resistance until we are at peace," she said--"until there is not a German soldier left in France. After that I shall teach acquiescence and personal liberty."

I looked at her very seriously; logic had no dwelling-place within her tender and unhappy heart.

And what a hunting-ground was that heart for men like Buckhurst! I could begin to read that mouse-colored gentleman now, to follow, after a fashion, the intricate policy which his insolent mind was shaping--shaping in stealthy contempt for me and for this young girl.

Thus far I could divine the thoughts of Mr. Buckhurst, but there were other matters to account for. Why did he choose to spare my life when a word would have sent me before the peloton of execution? Why had he brought to me the fortune in diamonds which he had stolen? Why did he eat humble-pie before a young girl from whom he and his companions had wrung the last penny? Why did he desire to go to Morbihan and be received among the elect in the Breton village of Paradise?