“Yes, if you say so.”
“I do — in the shadow of death.”
Jack was silent.
“I never loved — before,” said Sir Thorald.
In the stillness that followed Jack tried to comprehend the good or evil in this stricken man. He could not; he only knew that a great love that a man might bear a woman made necessary a great sacrifice if that love were unlawful. The greater the love the more certain the sacrifice — self-sacrifice on the altar of unselfish love, for there is no other kind of love that man may bear for woman.
It wearied Jack to try to think it out. He could not; he only knew that it was not his to judge or to condemn.
“Will you give me your hand?” asked Sir Thorald.
Jack laid his hand in the other’s feverish one.
“Don’t call her,” he said, distinctly; “I am dying.”
Presently he withdrew his hand and turned his face to the wall.
For a long time Jack sat there, waiting. At last he spoke: “Sir Thorald?”
But Sir Thorald had been dead for an hour.
When Alixe entered Jack took her slim, childish hands and looked into her eyes. She understood and went to her dead, laying down her tired little head on the sheeted breast.
CHAPTER XXII
A DOOR IS LOCKED
Lorraine stood on the terrace beside the brass gatling-gun, both hands holding to Jack’s arm, watching the soldiers stuffing the windows of the Château with mattresses, quilts, and bedding of all kinds.
A stream of engineers was issuing from the hallway, carrying tables, chairs, barrels, and chests to the garden below, where other soldiers picked them up and bore them across the lawn to the rear of the house.
“They are piling all the furniture they can get against the gate in the park wall,” said Jack; “come out to the kitchen-garden.”
She went with him, still holding to his arm. Across the vegetable garden a barricade of furniture — sofas, chairs, and wardrobes — lay piled against the wooden gate of the high stone wall. Engineers were piercing the wall with crowbars and pickaxes, loosening the cement, dragging out huge blocks of stone to make embrasures for three cannon that stood with their limbers among the broken bell-glasses and cucumber-frames in the garden.
A ladder lay against the wall, and on it was perched an officer, who rested his field-glasses across the tiled top and stood studying the woods. Below him a general and half a dozen officers watched the engineers hacking at the wall; a long, double line of infantry crouched behind them, the bugler kneeling, glancing anxiously at his captain, who stood talking to a fat sub-officer in capote and boots.
Artillerymen were gathered about the ammunition-chests, opening the lids and carrying shell and shrapnel to the wall; the balconies of the Château were piled up with breastworks of rugs, boxes, and sacks of earth. Here and there a rifleman stood, his chassepot resting on the iron railing, his face turned towards the woods.
“They are coming,” said a soldier, calling back to a comrade, who only laughed and passed on towards the kitchen, loaded down with sacks of flour.
A restless movement passed through the kneeling battalion of infantry.
“Fiche moi la paix, hein!” muttered a lieutenant, looking resentfully at a gossiping farrier. Another lieutenant drew his sword, and wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket.
“Are they coming?” asked Lorraine.
“I don’t know. Watch that officer on the wall. He seems to see nothing yet. Don’t you think you had better go to the rear of the house now?”
“No, not unless you do.”
“I will, then.”
“No, stay here. I am not afraid. Where is Alixe?”
“With the wounded men in the stable. They have hoisted the red cross over the barn; did you notice?”
Before she could answer, one of the soldiers on the balcony of the Château fired. Another rose from behind a mattress and fired also; then half a dozen shots rang out, and the smoke whirled up over the roof of the house. The officer on the ladder was motioning to the group of officers below; already the artillerymen were running the three cannon forward to the port-holes that had been pierced in the park wall.
“Come,” said Jack.
“Not yet — I am not frightened.”
A loud explosion enveloped the wall in sulphurous clouds, and a cannon jumped back in recoil. The cannoneers swarmed around it, there was a quick movement of a sponger, an order, a falling into place of rigid artillerymen, then bang! and another up-rush of smoke. And now the other cannon joined in — crash! bang! — and the garden swam in the swirling fog. Infantry, too, were firing all along the wall, and on the other side of the house the rippling crash of the gatling-gun rolled with the rolling volleys. Jack led Lorraine to the rear of the Château, but she refused to stay, and he reluctantly followed her into the house.
From every mattress-stuffed window the red-legged soldiers were firing out across the lawn towards the woods; the smoke drifted back into the house in thin shreds that soon filled the rooms with a blue haze.
Suddenly something struck the chandelier and shattered it to the gilt candle-sockets. Lorraine looked at it, startled, but another bullet whizzed into the room, starring the long mirror, and another knocked the plaster from the fireplace. Jack had her out of the room in a second, and presently they found themselves in the cellar, the very cement beneath their feet shaking under the tremendous shocks of the cannon.
“Wait for me. Do you promise, Lorraine?”
“Yes.”
He hurried up to the terrace again, and out across the gravel drive to the stable.
“Alixe!” he called.
She came quietly to him, her arms full of linen bandages. There was nothing of fear or terror in her cheeks, nothing even of grief now, but her eyes transfigured her face, and he scarcely knew it.
“What can I do?” he asked.
“Nothing. The wounded are quiet. Is there water in the well?”
He brought her half a dozen buckets, one after another, and set them side by side in the harness-room, where three or four surgeons lounged around two kitchen-tables, on which sponges, basins, and cases of instruments lay. There was a sickly odour of ether in the air, mingled with the rank stench of carbolic acid.
“Lorraine is in the cellar. Do you need her? Surely not — when I am ready,” he said.
“No; go and stay with her. If I need you I will send.”
He could scarcely hear her in the tumult and din, but he understood and nodded, watching her busy with her lint and bandages. As he turned to go, the first of the wounded, a mere boy, was brought in on the shoulders of a comrade. Jack heard him scream as they laid him on the table; then he went soberly away to the cellar where Lorraine sat, her face in her hands.
“We are holding the Château,” he said. “Will you stay quietly for a little while longer, if I go out again?”
“If you wish,” she said.
He longed to take her in his arms. He did not; he merely said, “Wait for me,” and went away again out into the smoke.
From the upper-story windows, where he had climbed, he could see to the edge of the forest. Already three columns of men had started out from the trees across the meadow towards the park wall. They advanced slowly and steadily, firing as they came on. Somewhere, in the smoke, a Prussian band was playing gayly, and Jack thought of the Bavarians at the Geisberg, and their bands playing as the men fell like leaves in the Château gardens.
He had his field-glasses with him, and he fixed them on the advancing columns. They were Bavarians, after all — there was no mistaking the light-blue uniforms and fur-crested helmets. And now he made out their band, plodding stolidly along, trombones and bass-drums wheezing and banging away in the rifle-smoke; he could even see the band-master swinging his halberd forward.
Suddenly the nearest column broke into a heavy run, cheering hoarsely. The other columns came on with a rush; the band halted, playing them in at the death with a rol
licking quickstep; then all was blotted out in the pouring cannon-smoke. Flash on flash the explosions followed each other, lighting the gloom with a wavering yellow glare, and on the terrace the gatling whirred and spluttered its slender streams of flame, while the treble crash of the chassepots roared accompaniment.
Once or twice Jack thought he heard the rattle of their little harsh, flat drums, but he could see them no longer; they were in that smoke-pall somewhere, coming on towards the park wall.
Bugles began to sound — French bugles — clear and sonorous. Across the lawn by the river a battalion of French infantry were running, firing as they ran. He saw them settle at last like quail among the stubble, curling up and crouching in groups and bevies, alert heads raised. Then the firing rippled along the front, and the lawn became gray with smoke.
As he went down the stairs and into the garden he heard the soldiers saying that the charge had been checked. The wounded were being borne towards the barn, long lines of them, heads and limbs hanging limp. A horse in the garden was ending a death-struggle among the cucumber-frames, and the battery-men were cutting the traces to give him free play. Upon the roof a thin column of smoke and sparks rose, where a Prussian shell — the first as yet — had fallen and exploded in the garret. Some soldiers were knocking the sparks from the roof with the butts of their rifles.
When he went into the cellar again Lorraine was pacing restlessly along the wine-bins.
“I cannot stay here,” she said. “Jack, get some bottles of brandy and come to the barn. The wounded will need them.”
“You cannot go out. I will take them.”
“No, I shall go.”
“I ask you not to.”
“Let me, Jack,” she said, coming up to him— “with you.”
He could not make her listen; she went with him, her slender arms loaded with bottles. The shells were falling in the garden now; one burst and flung a shower of earth and glass over them.
“Hurry!” he said. “Are you crazy, Lorraine, to come out into this?”
“Don’t scold, Jack,” she whispered.
When she entered the stable he breathed more freely. He watched her face narrowly, but she did not blanch at the sickening spectacle of the surgeons’ tables.
They placed their bottles of brandy along the side of a box-stall, and stood together watching the file of wounded passing in at the door.
“They do not need us here, yet,” he said. “I wonder where Alixe is?”
“There is a Sister of Mercy out on the skirmish-line across the lawn,” said a soldier of the hospital corps, pointing with bloody hands towards the smoke-veiled river.
Jack looked at Lorraine in utter despair.
“I must go; she can’t stay there,” he muttered.
“Yes, you must go,” repeated Lorraine. “She will be shot.”
“Will you wait here?” he asked.
“Yes.”
So he went away, thinking bitterly that she did not care whether he lived or died — that she let him leave her without a word of fear, of kindness. Then, for the first time, he realized that she had never, after all, been touched by his devotion; that she had never understood, nor cared to understand, his love for her. He walked out across the smoky lawn, the din of the rifles in his ears, the bitterness of death in his heart. He knew he was going into danger — that he was already in peril. Bullets whistled through the smoke as he advanced towards the firing-line, where, in the fog, dim figures were outlined here and there. He passed an officer, standing with bared sword, watching his men digging up the sod and piling it into low breastworks. He went on, passing others, sometimes two soldiers bearing a wounded man, now and then a maimed creature writhing on the grass or hobbling away to the rear. The battle-line lay close to him now — long open ranks of men, flat on their stomachs, firing into the smoke across the river-bank. Their officers loomed up in the gloom, some leaning quietly back on their sword-hilts, some pacing to and fro, smoking, or watchfully steadying the wearied men.
Almost at once he saw Alixe. She was standing beside a tall wounded officer, giving him something to drink from a tin cup.
“Alixe,” said Jack, “this is not your place.”
She looked at him tranquilly as the wounded man was led away by a soldier of the hospital corps.
“It is my place.”
“No,” he said, violently, “you are trying to find death here!”
“I seek nothing,” she said, in a gentle, tired voice; “let me go.”
“Come back. Alixe — your brother is alive.”
She looked at him impassively.
“My brother?”
“Yes.”
“I have no brother.”
He understood and chafed inwardly.
“Come, Alixe,” he urged; “for Heaven’s sake, try to live and forget—”
“I have nothing to forget — everything to remember. Let me pass.” She touched the blood-stained cross on her breast. “Do you not see? That was white once. So was my soul.”
“It is now,” he said, gently. “Come back.”
A wounded man somewhere in the smoke called, “Water! water! In the name of God! — my sister—”
“I am coming!” called Alixe, clearly.
“To me first! Hasten, my sister!” groaned another.
“Patience, children — I come!” called Alixe.
With a gesture she passed Jack; a flurry of smoke hid her. The pungent powder-fog made his eyes dim; his ears seemed to split with the terrific volley firing.
He turned away and went back across the lawn, only to stop at the well in the garden, fill two buckets, and plod back to the firing-line again. He found plenty to do there; he helped Alixe, following her with his buckets where she passed among the wounded, the stained cross on her breast. Once a bullet struck a pail full of water, and he held his finger in the hole until the water was all used up. Twice he heard cheering and the splash of cavalry in the shallow river, but they seemed to be beaten off again, and he went about his business, listless, sombre, a dead weight at his heart.
He had been kneeling beside a wounded man for some minutes when he became conscious that the firing had almost ceased. Bugles were sounding near the Château; long files of troops passed him in the lifting smoke; officers shouted along the river-bank.
He rose to his feet and looked around for Alixe. She was not in sight. He walked towards the river-bank, watching for her, but he could not find her.
“Did you see a Sister of Mercy pass this way?” he asked an officer who sat on the grass, smoking and bandaging his foot.
A soldier passing, using his rifle as a crutch, said: “I saw a Sister of Mercy. She went towards the Château. I think she was hurt.”
“Hurt!”
“I heard somebody say so.” Jack turned and hastened towards the stables. He crossed the lawn, threaded his way among the low sod breastworks, where the infantry lay grimy and exhausted, and entered the garden. She was not there. He hurried to the stables; Lorraine met him, holding a basin and a sponge.
“Where is Alixe?” he asked.
“She is not here,” said Lorraine. “Has she been hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at her a moment, then turned away, coldly. On the terrace the artillerymen were sponging the blood from the breech of their gatling where some wretch’s brains had been spattered by a shell-fragment. They told him that a Sister of Mercy had passed into the house ten minutes before; that she walked as though very tired, but did not appear to have been hurt.
“She is up-stairs,” he thought. “She must not stay there alone with Sir Thorald.” And he climbed the stairs and knocked softly at the door of the death-chamber.
“Alixe,” he said, gently, opening the door, “you must not stay here.”
She was kneeling at the bedside, her face buried on the breast of the dead man.
“Alixe,” he said, but his voice broke in spite of him, and he went to her and touched her.
> Very tenderly he raised her head, looked into her eyes, then quietly turned away.
Outside the door he met Lorraine.
“Don’t go in,” he murmured.
She looked fearfully up into his face.
“Yes,” he said, “she was shot through the body.”
Then he closed the door and turned the key on the outside, leaving the dead to the dead.
CHAPTER XXIII
LORRAINE SLEEPS
The next day the rain fell in torrents; long, yellow streams of water gushed from pipe and culvert, turning the roads to lakes of amber and the trodden lawns to sargasso seas.
Not a shot had been fired since twilight of the day before, although on the distant hills Uhlans were seen racing about, gathering in groups, or sitting on their horses in solitary observation of the Château.
Out on the meadows, between the park wall and the fringe of nearer forest, the Bavarian dead lay, dotting the green pelouse with blots of pale blue; the wounded had been removed to the cover of the woods.
Around the Château the sallow-faced fantassins slopped through the mire, the artillery trains lay glistening under their waterproof coverings, the long, slim cannon in the breeches dripped with rain. Bright blotches of rust, like brilliant fungi, grew and spread from muzzle to vent. These were rubbed away at times by stiff-limbed soldiers, swathed to the eyes in blue overcoats.
The line of battle stretched from the Château Morteyn, parallel with the river and the park wall, to the Château de Nesville; and along this line the officers were riding all day, muffled to the chin in their great-coats, crimson caps soaked, rain-drops gathering in brilliant beads under the polished visors. That they expected a shelling was evident, for the engineers were at work excavating pits and burrows, and the infantry were filling sacks with earth, while in the Château itself preparations were in progress for the fighting of fire.
The white flag with the red-cross centre hung limp and drenched over the stables and barns. In the corn-field beyond, long trenches were being dug for the dead. Already two such trenches had been filled and covered over with dirt; and at the head of each soldier’s grave a bayonet or sabre was driven into the ground for a head-stone.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 73