Lorraine Part 12

"The--the cla.s.s of '71?" muttered the furtive-eyed peasant, turning livid.

"Exactly--the bill of fare needs the hors d'uvres; you'll go as an olive, and probably come back a sardine--in a box."

And the fierce little man grinned, lighted a cigarette, and sauntered away, still grinning.

What did he care? He was a pompier and exempt.

VII

THE ROAD TO PARADISE

The road between Saint-Lys and Morteyn was not a military road, but it was firm and smooth, and Jack drove back again towards the Chateau at a smart trot, flicking at leaves and twigs with Cecil's whip.

The sun had brushed the veil of rain from the horizon; the leaves, fresh and tender, stirred and sparkled with dew in the morning breeze, and all the air was sweet-scented. In the stillness of the fields, where wheat stretched along the road like a green river tinged with gold, there was something that troubled him. Silence is oppressive to sinners and prophets. He concluded he was the former, and sighed restlessly, looking out across the fields, where, deep in the stalks of the wheat, blood-red poppies opened like raw wounds. At other times he had compared them to little fairy camp-fires; but his mood was pessimistic, and he saw, in the furrows that the plough had raised, the scars on the breast of a tortured earth; and he read sermons in bundles of fresh-cut f.a.gots; and death was written where a sickle lay beside a pile of gra.s.s, crisping to hay in the splendid sun of Lorraine.

What he did not see were the corn-flowers peeping at him with dewy blue eyes; the vineyards, where the fruit hung faintly touched with bloom; the field birds, the rosy-breasted finches, the thrush, as speckled as her own eggs--no, nor did he hear them; for the silence that weighed on his heart came from his heart. Yet all the summer wind was athrill with harmony.

Thousands of feathered throats swelled and bubbled melody, from the clouds to the feathery heath, from the scintillating azure in the zenith to the roots of the glittering wheat where the corn-flowers lay like bits of blue sky fallen to the earth.

As he drove he thought of Lorraine, of her love for her father and her goodness. He already recognized that dominant pa.s.sion in her, her unselfish adoration of her father--a father who sat all day behind bolted doors trifling with metals and gases and little spinning, noiseless wheels. The selfish to the unselfish, the dead to the living, the dwarf to the giant, and the sinner to the saint--this is the world and they that dwell therein.

He thought of her as he had seen her last, smiling up into the handsome, bearded face that questioned her. No, the wound was nothing--a little blood lost--enough to make her faint at his feet--that was all. But his precious box was safe--and she had flung her loyal arms about the man who saved it and had kissed him before her father, because he had secured what was dearer to her than life--her father's happiness--a little metal box full of it.

Her father was very grateful and very solicitous about her wounded shoulder; but he opened his box before he thought about bandages. Everything was intact, except the conservatory window and his daughter's shoulder. Both could be mended--but his box!

ah, that, if lost, could never be replaced.

Jack's throat was hard and dry. A lump came into it, and he swallowed with a shrug, and flicked at a fly on the headstall. A vision of Sir Thorald, bending over little Alixe, came before his eyes. "Pah!" he muttered, in disgust. Sir Thorald was one of those men who cease to care for a woman when she begins to care for them. Jack knew it; that was why he had been so gentle with Molly Hesketh, who had turned his head when he was a boy and given him his first emotions--pa.s.sion, hate--and then knowledge; for of all the deep emotions that a man shall know before he dies the first consciousness of knowledge is the most profound; it sounds the depths of heaven and h.e.l.l in the s.p.a.ce of time that the heart beats twice.

He was pa.s.sing through the woods now, the lovely oak and beech woods of Lorraine. An ancient dame, bending her crooked back beneath a load of f.a.gots, gave him "G.o.d bless you!" and he drew rein and returned the gift--but his was in silver, with the head of his imperial majesty stamped on one side.

As he drove, rabbits ran back into the woods, hoisting their white signals of conciliation. "Peace and good will" they seemed to read, "but a wise rabbit takes to the woods." Pheasants, too, stepped daintily from under the filbert bushes, twisting their gorgeous necks curiously as he pa.s.sed. Once, in the hollow of a gorge where a little stream trickled under layers of wet leaves, he saw a wild-boar standing hock-deep in the ooze, rooting under mosses and rotten branches, absorbed in his rooting. Twice deer leaped from the young growth on the edge of the fields and bounded lazily into denser cover, only to stop when half concealed and stare back at him with gentle, curious eyes. The horse p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at such times and introduced a few waltz steps into his steady if monotonous repertoire, but Jack let him have his fling, thinking that the deer were as tame as the horse, and both were tamer than man.

Excepting the black panther, man has learned his lesson slowest of all, the lesson of acquiescence in the inevitable.

"I'll never learn it," said Jack, aloud. His voice startled him--it was trembling.

Lorraine! Lorraine! Life has begun for a very young man. Teach him to see and bring him to accept existence in the innocence of your knowledge; for, if he and the world collide, he fears the result to the world.

A few moments later he drove into Paradise, which is known to some as the Chateau de Nesville.

VIII

UNDER THE YOKE

During the next two weeks Jack Marche drove into Paradise fourteen times, and fourteen times he drove out of Paradise, back to the Chateau Morteyn. Heaven is nearer than people suppose; it was three miles from the road shrine at Morteyn.

Our Lady of Morteyn, sculptured in the cold stone above the shrine, had looked with her wide stone eyes on many lovers, and had known they were lovers because their piety was as sudden as it was fervid.

Twice a day Jack's riding-cap was reverently doffed as he drew bridle before the shrine, going and coming from Paradise.

At evening, too, when the old vicomte slept on his pillow and the last light went out in the stables, Our Lady of Morteyn saw a very young man sitting, with his head in his hands, at her feet; and he took no harm from the cold stones, because Our Lady of Morteyn is gentle and gracious, and the summer nights were hot in the province of Lorraine.

There had been little stir or excitement in Morteyn. Even in Saint-Lys, where all day and all night the troop-trains rushed by, the cheers of the war-bound soldiers leaning from the flying cars were becoming monotonous in the ears of the sober villagers.

When the long, flat cars, piled with cannon, pa.s.sed, the people stared at the slender guns, mute, canvas-covered, tilted skyward.

They stared, too, at the barred cars, rolling past in interminable trains, loaded with horses and canvas-jacketed troopers who peered between the slats and shouted to the women in the street. Other trains came and went, trains weighted with bellowing cattle or huddled sheep, trains choked with small square boxes marked "Cartouches" or "Obus--7^me"; trains piled high with grain or clothing, or folded tents packed between varnished poles and piles of tin basins. Once a little excitement came to Saint-Lys when a battalion of red-legged infantry tramped into the village square and stacked rifles and jeered at the mayor and drank many bottles of red wine to the health of the shy-eyed girls peeping at them from every lattice. But they were only waiting for the next train, and when it came their bugles echoed from the bridge to the square, and they went away--went where the others had gone--laughing, singing, cheering from the car-windows, where the sun beat down on their red caps, and set their b.u.t.tons glittering like a million swarming fire-flies.

The village life, the daily duties, the dull routine from the vineyard to the grain-field, and from the etang to the forest had not changed in Saint-Lys.

There might be war somewhere; it would never come to Saint-Lys.

There might be death, yonder towards the Rhine--probably beyond it, far beyond it. What of it? Death comes to all, but it comes slowly in Saint-Lys; and the days are long, and one must eat to live, and there is much to be done between the rising and the setting of a peasant's sun.

There, below in Paris, were wise heads and many soldiers. They, in Paris, knew what to do, and the war might begin and end with nothing but a soiled newspaper in the Cafe Saint-Lys to show for it--as far as the people of Saint-Lys knew.

True, at the summons of the mayor, the National Guard of Saint-Lys mustered in the square, seven strong and a bugler. This was merely a display of force--it meant nothing--but let those across the Rhine beware!

The fierce little man with the gray mustache, who was named Trica.s.se, and who commanded the Saint-Lys Pompiers, spoke gravely of Francs-corps, and drank too much eau-de-vie every evening. But these warlike ebullitions simmered away peacefully in the suns.h.i.+ne, and the tranquil current of life flowed as smoothly through Saint-Lys as the river Lisse itself, limpid, noiseless, under the village bridge.

Only one man had left the village, and that was Brun, the furtive-eyed young peasant, the sole representative in Saint-Lys of the conscript cla.s.s of 1871. And he would never have gone had not a gendarme pulled him from under his mother's bed and hustled him on to the first Paris-bound train, which happened to be a cattle train, where Brun mingled his lamentations with the bleating of sheep and the desolate bellow of thirsty cows.

Jack Marche heard of these things but saw little of them. The great war wave rolling through the provinces towards the Rhine skirted them at Saint-Lys, and scarcely disturbed them. They heard that Douay was marching through the country somewhere, some said towards Wissembourg, some said towards Saarbruck. But these towns were names to the peasants of Saint-Lys--tant pis for the two towns! And General Douay--who was he? Probably a fat man in red breeches and polished boots, wearing a c.o.c.ked-hat and a cross on his breast. Anyway, they would chase the Prussians and kill a few, as they had chased the Russians in the Crimea, and the Italians in Rome, and the Kabyles in Oran. The result? Nothing but a few new colours for the ribbons in their sweethearts'

hair--like that pretty Magenta and Solferino and Sebastopol gray.

"Fichtre! Faut-il gaspiller tout de meme! mais, a la guerre comme a la guerre!" which meant nothing in Saint-Lys.

It meant more to Jack Marche, riding one sultry afternoon through the woods, idly drumming on his spurred boots with a battered riding-crop.

It was his daily afternoon ride to the Chateau de Nesville; the shy wood creatures were beginning to know him, even the younger rabbits of the most recent generation sat up and mumbled their prehensile lips, watching him with large, moist eyes. As for the red squirrels in the chestnut-trees, and the dappled deer in the carrefours, and the sulky boars that bristled at him from the overgrown sentiers, they accepted him on condition that he kept to the road. And he did, head bent, thoughtful eyes fixed on his saddle-bow, drumming absently with his riding-crop on his spurred boots, his bridle loose on his horse's neck.

There was little to break the monotony of the ride; a sudden gush of song from a spotted thrush, the rustle of a pheasant in the brake, perhaps the modest greeting of a rare keeper patrolling his beat--nothing more. He went armed; he carried a long Colt's six-shooter in his holster, not because he feared for his own skin, but he thought it just as well to be ready in case of trouble at the Chateau de Nesville. However, he did not fear trouble again; the French armies were moving everywhere on the frontier, and the spies, of course, had long ago betaken themselves and their projects to the other bank of the Rhine.

The Marquis de Nesville himself felt perfectly secure, now that the attempt had been made and had failed.

He told Jack so on the few occasions when he descended from his room during the young fellow's visits. He made not the slightest objections to Jack's seeing Lorraine when and where he pleased, and this very un-Gallic behaviour puzzled Jack until he began to comprehend the depths of the man's selfish absorption in his balloons. It was more than absorption, it was mania pure and simple, an absolute inability to see or hear or think or understand anything except his own devices in the little bolted chamber above.

He did care for Lorraine to the extent of providing for her every want--he did remember her existence when he wanted something himself. Also it was true that he would not have permitted a Frenchman to visit Lorraine as Jack did. He hated two persons; one of these was Jack's uncle, the Vicomte de Morteyn. On the other hand, he admired him, too, because the vicomte, like himself, was a royalist and shunned the Tuileries as the devil shuns holy water. Therefore he was his equal, and he liked him because he could hate him without loss of self-respect. The reason he hated him was this--the Vicomte de Morteyn had pooh-poohed the balloons. That occurred years ago, but he never forgot it, and had never seen the old vicomte since. Whether or not Lorraine visited the old people at Morteyn, he had neither time nor inclination to inquire.

This was the man, tall, gentle, clean-cut of limb and feature, and bearded like Jove--this was the man to whom Lorraine devoted her whole existence. Every heart-beat was for him, every thought, every prayer. And she was very devout.

This also was why she came to Jack so confidently and laid her white hands in his when he sprang from his saddle, his heart in flames of adoration.

He knew this, he knew that her undisguised pleasure in his company was, for her, only another link that welded her closer to her father. At night, often, when he had ridden back again, he thought of it, and paled with resentment. At times he almost hated her father. He could have borne it easier if the Marquis de Nesville had been a loving father, even a tyrannically solicitous father; but to see such love thrown before a marble-faced man, whose expression never changed except when speaking of his imbecile machines! "How can he! How can he!" muttered Jack, riding through the woods. His face was sombre, almost stern; and always he beat the devil's tattoo on his boot with the battered riding-crop.