“Do the people of France remember when the Empress was first declared enciente? The cannon thundered from the orangerie at Saint-Cloud, the dome of the Invalides blazed rockets, the city glittered under a canopy of coloured fire. Oh, they were very careful of the Empress of the French! They went to Saint-Cloud, and later to Versailles, as they go to holy cities, praying. And the Emperor himself grew younger, they said.
“Then came the news that the expected heir, a son, had been born dead! Lies!
“I, Gilbert de Nesville, was in the forest when the Empress of the French fell ill. When separated from the others she called to Morny, and bade him drive for the love of Heaven! And they drove — they drove to the Trianon, and there was no one there. And there the child was born. Morny held it in his arms. He came out to the colonnade holding it in his arms, and calling for a messenger. I came, and when I was close to Morny I struck him in the face and he fell senseless. I took the child and wrapped it in my cloak. This is the truth!
“They dared not tell it; they dared not, for fear and for shame. They said that an heir had been born dead; and they mourned for their dead son. It was only a daughter. She is alive; she loves me, and, God forgive me, I hate her for defeating my just vengeance.
“And I call her Lorraine de Nesville.”
CHAPTER XXVI
THE SHADOW OF POMP
The long evening shadows were lengthening among the trees; sleepy birds twitted in dusky thickets; Lorraine slept.
Jack still stood staring at the paper in his hands, trying to understand the purport of what he read and reread, until the page became a blur and his hot eyes burned.
All the significance of the situation rose before him. This child, the daughter of the oath-breaker, the butcher of December, the sly, slow diplomate of Europe, the man of Rome, of Mexico, the man now reeling back to Châlons under the iron blows of an aroused people. In Paris, already, they cursed his name; they hurled insults at the poor Empress, that mother in despair. Thiers, putting his senile fingers in the porridge, stirred a ferment that had not even germinated since the guillotine towered in the Place de la Concorde and the tumbrils rattled through the streets. He did not know what he was stirring. The same impulse that possessed Gladstone to devastate trees animated Thiers. He stirred the dangerous mess because he liked to stir, nothing more. But from that hell’s broth the crimson spectre of the Commune was to rise, when the smoke of Sedan had drifted clear of a mutilated nation.
Through the heavy clouds of death which were already girdling Paris, that flabby Cyclops, Gambetta, was to mouth his monstrous platitudes, and brood over the battle-smoke, a nightmare of pomposity and fanfaronade — in a balloon. All France was bowed down in shame at the sight of the grotesque convoy, who were proclaiming her destiny among nations, and their destiny to lead her to victory and “la gloire.” A scorched, blood-soaked land, a pall of smoke through which brave men bared their breasts to the blast from the Rhine, and died uncomplainingly, willingly, cheerfully, for the mother-land — was it not pitiful?
The sublime martyrdom of the men who marched, who shall write it? And who shall write of those others — Bazaine, Napoleon, Thiers, Gambetta, Favre, Ollivier?
If Bazaine died, cursed by a nation, his martyrdom, for martyrdom it was, was no greater than that of the humblest French peasant, who, dying, knew at last that he died, not for France, but because the men who sent him were worse than criminal — they were imbecile.
The men who marched were sublime; they were the incarnation of embattled France; the starving people of Metz, of Strassbourg, of Paris, were sublime. But there was nothing sublime about Monsieur Adolphe Thiers, nothing heroic about Hugo, nothing respectable about Gambetta. The marshal with the fat neck and Spanish affiliations, the poor confused, inert, over-fed marshal caged in Metz by the Red Prince, harassed, bewildered, stunned by the clashing of politics and military strategy, which his meagre brain was unable to reconcile or separate — this unfortunate incapable was deserving of pity, perhaps of contempt. His cup was to be bitterer than that — it was to be drained, too, with the shouts of “Traitor” stunning his fleshy ears.
He was no traitor. Cannot France understand that this single word “traitor” has brought her to contempt in the eyes of the world? There are two words that mar every glorious, sublime page of the terrible history of 1870-71, and these two words are “treason” and “revenge.” Let the nation face the truth, let the people write “incapacity” for “treason,” and “honour” for “revenge,” and then the abused term “la gloire” will be justified in the eyes of men.
As for Thiers, let men judge him from his three revolutions, let the unknown dead in the ditches beyond the enceinte judge him, let the spectres of the murdered from Père Lachaise to the bullet-pitted terrace of the Luxembourg judge this meddler, this potterer in epoch-making cataclysms. Bismarck, gray, imbittered, without honour in an unenlightened court, can still smile when he remembers Jules Favre and his prayer for the National Guard.
And these were the men who formed the convoy around the chariot of France militant, France in arms! — a cortège at once hideous, shameful, ridiculous, grotesque.
What was left of the Empire? Metz still held out; Strassbourg trembled under the shock of Prussian mortars; Paris strained its eyes for the first silhouette of the Uhlan on the heights of Versailles; and through the chill of the dying year the sombre Emperor, hunted, driven, threatened, tumbled into the snare of Sedan as a sick buzzard flutters exhausted to earth under a shower of clubs and stones.
The end was to be brutal: a charge or two of devoted men, a crush at the narrow gates, a white flag, a brusque gesture from Bismarck, nothing more except a “guard of honour,” an imperial special train, and Belgian newsboys shrieking along the station platform, “Extra! Fall of the Empire! Paris proclaims the Republic! Flight of the Empress! Extra!”
Jack, sitting with the paper in his hands, read between the lines, and knew that the prophecy of evil days would be fulfilled. But as yet the writing on the wall of Alsatian hills had not spelled “Sedan,” nor did he know of the shambles of Mars-la-Tour, the bloody work at Buzancy, the retreat from Châlons, and the evacuation of Vitry.
Buzancy marked the beginning of the end. It was nothing but a skirmish; the 3d Saxon Cavalry, a squadron or two of the 18th Uhlans, and Zwinker’s Battery fought a half-dozen squadrons of chasseurs. But the red-letter mark on the result was unmistakable. Bazaine’s correspondence was captured. On the same day the second sortie occurred from Strassbourg. It was time, for the trenches and parallels had been pushed within six hundred paces of the glacis. And so it was everywhere, the whole country was in a ferment of disorganized but desperate resistance of astonishment, indignation, dismay.
The nation could not realize that it was too late, that it was not conquest but invasion which the armies of France must prepare for. Blow after blow fell, disaster after disaster stunned the country, while the government studied new and effective forms of lying and evasion, and the hunted Emperor drifted on to his doom in the pitfall of Sedan.
All Alsace except Belfort, Strassbourg, Schlettstadt, and Neuf Brisac was in German hands, under German power, governed by German law. The Uhlans scoured the country as clean as possible, but the franc-tireurs roamed from forest to forest, sometimes gallantly facing martyrdom, sometimes looting, burning, pillaging, and murdering. If Germans maintain that the only good franc-tireur is a dead franc-tireur, they are not always justified. Let them sit first in judgment on Andreas Hofer. England had Hereward; America, Harry Lee; and, when the South is ready to acknowledge Mosby and Quantrell of the same feather, it will be time for France to blush for her franc-tireurs. Noble and ignoble, patriots and cowards, the justified and the misguided wore the straight képi and the sheepskin jacket. All figs in Spain are not poisoned.
With the fall of the Château Morteyn, the war in Lorraine would degenerate into a combat between picquets of Uhlans and roving franc-tireurs. There would be executions of spies, vengeance
on peasants, examples made of franc-tireurs, and all the horrors of irregular warfare. Jack knew this; he understood it perfectly when the muddy French infantry tramped out of the Château Morteyn and vanished among the dark hills in the rain.
For himself, had he been alone, there would have been nothing to keep him in the devastated province. Indeed, considering his peculiarly strained relations with the Uhlans of Rickerl’s regiment, it behooved him to get across the Belgian frontier very promptly.
Now he not only had Lorraine, he had the woman who loved him and who was ready to sacrifice herself and him too for the honour of France. She lived for one thing — the box, with its pitiful contents, its secrets of aërial navigation and destruction, must be placed at the service of France. The government was France now, and the Empress was the government. Lorraine knew nothing of the reasons her father had had for his hatred of the Emperor and the Empire. Personal grievances, even when those grievances were her father’s, even though they might be justified, would never deter her from placing the secrets that might aid, might save, France with the man who, at that moment, in her eyes, represented the safety, security, the very existence of the land she loved.
Jack knew this. Whether she was right or not did not occur to him to ask. But the irony of it, the grim necessity of such a fate, staggered him — a daughter seeking her father at the verge of his ruin — a child, long lost, forgotten, unrecognized, unclaimed, finding the blind path to a father who, when she had been torn from him, dared not seek for her, dared not whisper of her existence except to Morny in the cloaked shadows of secret places.
For good or ill Jack made up his mind; he had decided for himself and for her. Her loveless, lonely childhood had been enough of sorrow for one young life; she should have no further storm, no more heartaches, nothing but peace and love and the strong arm of a man to shield her. Let her remember the only father she had ever known — let her remember him with faithful love and sorrow as she would. For the wrong he had done, let him account to another tribunal; her, the echo of that crime and hate and passion must never reach.
Why should he, the man who loved her, bring to her this heritage of ruin? Why should he tear the veil from her trusting eyes and show her a land bought with blood and broken oaths, sold in blood and infamy? Why should he show her this, and say, “This is the work of your imperial family! There is your father! — some call him the Assassin of December! There is your mother! — read the pages of an Eastern diary! There, too, is your brother, a sick child of fifteen, baptized at Saarbrück, endowed at Sedan?”
It was enough that France lay prostrate, that the wounded screamed from the blood-wet fields, that the quiet dead lay under the pall of smoke from the nation’s funeral pyre. It was enough that the parents suffer, that the son drag out an existence among indifferent or hostile people in an alien land. The daughter should never know, never weep when they wept, never pray when they prayed. This was retribution — not his, he only watched in silence the working of divine justice.
He tore the paper into fragments and ground them under his heel deep into the soft forest mould.
Lorraine slept.
He stood a long while in silence looking down at her. She was breathing quietly, regularly; her long, curling lashes rested on curved cheeks, delicate as an infant’s.
Half fearfully he stooped to arouse her. A footfall sounded on the dead leaves behind him, and a franc-tireur touched him on the shoulder.
CHAPTER XXVII
ÇA IRA!
“What do you want?” asked Jack, in a voice that vibrated unpleasantly. There was a dangerous light in his eyes; his lips grew thinner and whiter. One by one a dozen franc-tireurs stepped from behind the trees on every side, rifles shimmering in the subdued afternoon haze — wiry, gloomy-eyed men, their sleeveless sheepskin jackets belted in with leather, their sombre caps and trousers thinly banded with orange braid. They looked at him without speaking, almost without curiosity, fingering their gunlocks, bayoneted rifles unslung.
“Your name?” said the man who had touched him on the shoulder.
He did not reply at once. One of the men began to laugh.
“He’s the vicomte’s nephew,” said another; and, pointing at Lorraine, who, now aroused, sat up on the moss beside Jack, he continued: “And that is the little châtelaine of the Château de Nesville.” He took off his straight-visored cap.
The circle of gaunt, sallow faces grew friendly, and, as Lorraine stood up, looking questioningly from one to the other, caps were doffed, rifle-butts fell to the ground.
“Why, it’s Monsieur Tricasse of the Saint-Lys Pompiers!” she said. “Oh, and there is le Père Passerat, and little Émile Brun! Émile, my son, why are you not with your regiment?” The dark faces lighted up; somebody snickered; Brun, the conscript of the class of ‘71 who had been hauled by the heels from under his mother’s bed, looked confused and twiddled his thumbs.
One by one the franc-tireurs came shambling up to pay their awkward respects to Lorraine and to Jack, while Tricasse pulled his bristling mustache and clattered his sabre in its sheath approvingly. When his men had acquitted themselves with all the awkward sincerity of Lorraine peasants, he advanced with a superb bow and flourish, lifting his cap from his gray head:
“In my quality of ex-pompier and commandant of the ‘Terrors of Morteyn’ — my battalion” — here he made a sweeping gesture as though briefly reviewing an army corps instead of a dozen wolfish-eyed peasants— “I extend to our honoured and beloved Châtelaine de Nesville, and to our honoured guest, Monsieur Marche, the protection and safe-conduct of the ‘Terrors of Morteyn.’”
As he spoke his expression became exalted. He, Tricasse, ex-pompier and exempt, was posing as the saviour of his province, and he felt that, though German armies stretched in endless ranks from the Loire to the Meuse, he, Tricasse, was the man of destiny, the man of the place and the hour when beauty was in distress.
Lorraine, her eyes dim with gentle tears, held out both slender hands; Tricasse bent low and touched them with his grizzled mustache. Then he straightened up, frowned at his men, and said “Attention!” in a very fierce voice.
The half-starved fellows shuffled into a single rank; their faces were wreathed in sheepish smiles. Jack noticed that a Bavarian helmet and side-arm hung from the knapsack of one, a mere freckled lad, downy and dimpled. Tricasse drew his sabre, turned, marched solemnly along the front, wheeled again, and saluted.
Jack lifted his cap; Lorraine, her arm in his, bowed and smiled tearfully.
“The dear, brave fellows!” she cried, impulsively, whereat every man reddened, and Tricasse grew giddy with emotion. He tried to speak; his emotion was great.
“In my capacity of ex-pompier,” he gasped, then went to pieces, and hid his eyes in his hands. The “Terrors of Morteyn” wept with him to a man.
Presently, with a gesture to Tricasse, Jack led Lorraine down the slope, past the spring, and on through the forest, three “Terrors” leading, rifles poised, Tricasse and the others following, alert and balancing their cocked rifles.
“How far is your camp?” asked Jack. “We need food and the warmth of a fire. Tell me, Monsieur Tricasse, what is left of the two châteaux?”
Lorraine bent nearer as the old man said: “The Château de Nesville is a mass of cinders; Morteyn, a stone skeleton. Pierre is dead. There are many dead there — many, many dead. The Prussians burned Saint-Lys yesterday; they shot Bosquet, the letter-carrier; they hung his boy to the railroad trestle, then shot him to pieces. The Curé is a prisoner; the Mayor of Saint-Lys and the Notary have been sent to the camp at Strassbourg. We, my ‘Terrors of Morteyn’ and I, are still facing the vandals; except for us, the Province of Lorraine is empty of Frenchmen in armed resistance.”
The old man, in his grotesque uniform, touched his bristling mustache and muttered: “Nom d’une pipe!” several times to steady his voice.
Lorraine and Jack pressed on silently, sorrowfully, hand in hand, watching the scouts ahea
d, who were creeping on through the trees, heads turning from side to side, rifles raised. They passed along the back of a thickly wooded ridge for some distance, perhaps a mile, before the thin blue line of a smouldering camp-fire rose almost in their very faces. A low challenge from a clump of birch-trees was answered, there came the sound of rifles dropping, the noise of feet among the leaves, a whisper, and before they knew it they were standing at the mouth of a hole in the bank, from which came the odour of beef-broth simmering. Two or three franc-tireurs passed them, looking up curiously into their faces. Tricasse dragged a dilapidated cane-chair from the dirt-cave and placed it before Lorraine as though he were inviting her to an imperial throne.
“Thank you,” she said, sweetly, and seated herself, not relinquishing Jack’s hand.
Two tin basins of soup were brought to them; they ate it, soaking bits of crust in it.
The men pretended not to watch them. With all their instinctive delicacy these clumsy peasants busied themselves in guard-mounting, weapon cleaning, and their cuisine, as though there was no such thing as a pretty woman within miles. But it tried their gallantry as Frenchmen and their tact as Lorraine peasants. Furtive glances, deprecatory and timid, were met by the sweetest of smiles from Lorraine or a kindly nod from Jack. Tricasse, utterly unbalanced by his new rôle of protector of beauty, gave orders in fierce, agitated whispers, and made sudden aimless promenades around the birch thicket. In one of these prowls he discovered a toad staring at the camp-fire, and he drew his sword with a furious gesture, as though no living toad were good enough to intrude on the Châtelaine of the Château de Nesville; but the toad hopped away, and Tricasse unbent his brows and resumed his agitated prowl.
When Lorraine had finished her soup, Jack took both plates into the cave and gave them to a man who, squatted on his haunches, was washing dishes. Lorraine followed him and sat down on a blanket, leaning back against the side of the cave.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 76