Chapter 12. From The Frontier

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_ CHAPTER XII. FROM THE FRONTIER

During the next three days, for the first time since he had known her, he did not go to see Lorraine. How he stood it--how he ever dragged through those miserable hours--he himself never could understand.

The wide sculptured eyes of Our Lady of Morteyn above the shrine seemed to soften when he went there to sit at her feet and stare at nothing. It was not tears, but dew, that gathered under the stone lids, for the night had grown suddenly hot, and everything lay moist in the starlight. Night changed to midnight, and midnight to dawn, and dawn to another day, cloudless, pitiless; and Jack awoke again, and his waking thought was of Lorraine.

All day long he sat with the old vicomte, reading to him when he wished, playing interminable games of chess, sick at heart with a longing that almost amounted to anger. He could not tell his aunt. As far as that went, the wise old lady had divined that their first trouble had come to them in all the appalling and exaggerated proportions that such troubles assume, but she smiled gently to herself, for she, too, had been young, and the ways of lovers had been her ways, and the paths of love she had trodden, and she had drained love's cup at bitter springs.

That night she came to his bedside and kissed him, saying: "To-morrow you shall carry my love and my thanks to Lorraine for her care of the horse."

"I can't," muttered Jack.

"Pooh!" said Madame de Morteyn, and closed the bedroom door; and Jack slept better that night.

It was ten o'clock the next morning before he appeared at breakfast, and it was plain, even to the thrush on the lawn outside, that he had bestowed an elaboration upon his toilet that suggested either a duel or a wedding.

Madame de Morteyn hid her face, for she could not repress the smile that tormented her sweet mouth. Even the vicomte said: "Oh! You're not off for Paris, Jack, are you?"

After breakfast he wandered moodily out to the terrace, where his aunt found him half an hour later, mooning and contemplating his spotless gloves.

"Then you are not going to ride over to the Chateau de Nesville?" she asked, trying not to laugh.

"Oh!" he said, with affected surprise, "did you wish me to go to the Chateau?"

"Yes, Jack dear, if you are not too much occupied." She could not repress the mischievous accent on the "too." "Are you going to drive?"

"No; I shall walk--unless you are in a hurry."

"No more than you are, dear," she said, gravely.

He looked at her with sudden suspicion, but she was not smiling.

"Very well," he said, gloomily.

About eleven o'clock he had sauntered half the distance down the forest road that leads to the Chateau de Nesville. His heart seemed to tug and tug and urge him forward; his legs refused obedience; he sulked. But there was the fresh smell of loam and moss and aromatic leaves, the music of the Lisse on the pebbles, the joyous chorus of feathered creatures from every thicket, and there were the antics of the giddy young rabbits that scuttled through the warrens, leaping, tumbling, sitting up, lop-eared and impudent, or diving head-first into their burrows.

Under the stems of a thorn thicket two cock-pheasants were having a difference, and were enthusiastically settling that difference in the approved method of game-cocks. He lingered to see which might win, but a misstep and a sudden crack of a dry twig startled them, and they withdrew like two stately but indignant old gentlemen who had been subjected to uncalled-for importunities.

Presently he felt cheerful enough to smoke, and he searched in every pocket for his pipe. Then he remembered that he had dropped it when he dropped his silver flask, there in the road where he had first been startled by the Uhlans.

This train of thought depressed him again, but he resolutely put it from his mind, lighted a cigarette, and moved on.

Just ahead, around the bend in the path, lay the grass-grown carrefour where he had first seen Lorraine. He thought of her as he remembered her then, flushed, indignant, blocking the path while the map-making spy sneered in her face and crowded past her, still sneering. He thought, too, of her scarlet skirt, and the little velvet bodice and the silver chains. He thought of her heavy hair, dishevelled, glimmering in her eyes. At the same moment he turned the corner; the carrefour lay before him, overgrown, silent, deserted. A sudden tenderness filled his heart--ah, how we love those whom we have protected!--and he stood for a moment in the sunshine with bowed head, living over the episode that he could never forget. Every word, every gesture, the shape of the very folds in her skirt, he remembered; yes, and the little triangular tear, the broken silver chain, the ripped bodice!

And she, in her innocence, had promised to see him there at the river-bank below. He had never gone, because that very night she had come to Morteyn, and since then he had seen her every day at her own home.

As he stood he could hear the river Lisse whispering, calling him. He would go--just to see the hidden rendezvous--for old love's sake; it was a step from the path, no more.

Then that strange instinct, that sudden certainty that comes at times to all, seized him, and he knew that Lorraine was there by the river; he knew it as surely as though he saw her before him.

And she was there, standing by the still water, silver chains drooping over the velvet bodice, scarlet skirt hanging brilliant and heavy as a drooping poppy in the sun.

"Dear me," she said, very calmly, "I thought you had quite forgotten me. Why have you not been to the Chateau, Monsieur Marche?"

And this, after she had told him to go away and not to return! Wise in the little busy ways of the world of men, he was uneducated in the ways of a maid.

Therefore he was speechless.

"And now," she said, with the air of an early Christian tete-a-tete with Nero--"and now you do not speak to me? Why?"

"Because," he blurted out, "I thought you did not care to have me!"

Surprise, sorrow, grief gave place to pity in her eyes.

"What a silly man!" she observed. "I am going to sit down on the moss. Are you intending to call upon my father? He is still in the turret. If you can spare a moment I will tell you what he is doing."

Yes, he had a moment to spare--not many moments--he hoped she would understand that!--but he had one or two little ones at her disposal.

She read this in his affected hesitation. She would make him pay dearly for it. Vengeance should be hers!

He stood a moment, eying the water as though it had done him personal injury. Then he sat down.

"The balloon is almost ready, steering-gear and all," she said. "I saw papa yesterday for a moment; I tried to get him to stay with me, but he could not."

She looked wistfully across the river.

Jack watched her. His heart ached for her, and he bent nearer.

"Forgive me for causing you any unhappiness," he said. "Will you?"

"Yes."

Oh! where was her vengeance now? So far beneath her!

"These four days have been the most wretched days to me, the most unhappy I have ever lived," he said. The emotion in his voice brought the soft colour to her face. She did not answer; she would have if she had wished to check him.

"I will never again, as long as I live, give you one moment's--displeasure." He was going to say "pain," but he dared not.

Still she was silent, her idle white fingers clasped in her lap, her eyes fixed on the river. Little by little the colour deepened in her cheeks. It was when she felt them burning that she spoke, nervously, scarcely comprehending her own words: "I--I also was unhappy--I was silly; we both are very silly--don't you think so? We are such good friends that it seems absurd to quarrel as we have. I have forgotten everything that was unpleasant--it was so little that I could not remember if I tried! Could you? I am very happy now; I am going to listen while you amuse me with stories." She curled up against a tree and smiled at him--at the love in his eyes which she dared not read, which she dared not acknowledge to herself. It was there, plain enough for a wilful maid to see; it burned under his sun-tanned cheeks, it softened the firm lips. A thrill of contentment passed through her. She was satisfied; the world was kind again.

He lay at her feet, pulling blades of grass from the bank and idly biting the whitened stems. The voice of the Lisse was in his ears, he breathed the sweet wood perfume and he saw the sunlight wrinkle and crinkle the surface ripples where the water washed through the sedges, and the long grasses quivered and bent with the glittering current.

"Tell you stories?" he asked again.

"Yes--stories that never have really happened--but that should have happened."

"Then listen! There was once--many, many years ago--a maid and a man--"

Good gracious--but that story is as old as life itself! He did not realize it, nor did she. It seemed new to them.

The sun of noon was moving towards the west when they remembered that they were hungry.

"You shall come home and lunch with me; will you? Perhaps papa may be there, too," she said. This hope, always renewed with every dawn, always fading with the night, lived eternal in her breast--this hope, that one day she should have her father to herself.

"Will you come?" she asked, shyly.

"Yes. Do you know it will be our first luncheon together?"

"Oh, but you brought me an ice at the dance that evening; don't you remember?"

"Yes, but that was not a supper--I mean a luncheon together--with a table between us and--you know what I mean."

"I don't," she said, smiling dreamily; so he knew that she did.

They hurried a little on the way to the Chateau, and he laughed at her appetite, which made her laugh, too, only she pretended not to like it.

At the porch she left him to change her gown, and slipped away up-stairs, while he found old Pierre and was dusted and fussed over until he couldn't stand it another moment. Luckily he heard Lorraine calling her maid on the porch, and he went to her at once.

"Papa says you may lunch here--I spoke to him through the key-hole. It is all ready; will you come?"

A serious-minded maid served them with salad and thin bread-and-butter.

"Tea!" exclaimed Jack.

"Isn't that very American?" asked Lorraine, timidly. "I thought you might like it; I understood that all Americans drank tea."

"They do," he said, gravely; "it is a terrible habit--a national vice--but they do."

"Now you are laughing at me!" she cried. "Marianne, please to remove that tea! No, no, I won't leave it--and you can suffer if you wish. And to think that I--"

They were both laughing so that the maid's face grew more serious, and she removed the teapot as though she were bearing some strange and poisonous creature to a deserved doom.

As they sat opposite each other, smiling, a little flurried at finding themselves alone at table together, but eating with the appetites of very young lovers, the warm summer wind, blowing through the open windows, bore to their ears the songs of forest birds. It bore another sound, too; Jack had heard it for the last two hours, or had imagined he heard it--a low, monotonous vibration, now almost distinct, now lost, now again discernible, but too vague, too indefinite to be anything but that faint summer harmony which comes from distant breezes, distant movements, mingling with the stir of drowsy field insects, half torpid in the heat of noon.

Still it was always there; and now, turning his ear to the window, he laid down knife and fork to listen.

"I have also noticed it," said Lorraine, answering his unasked question.

"Do you hear it now?"

"Yes--more distinctly now."

A few moments later Jack leaned back in his chair and listened again.

"Yes," said Lorraine, "it seems to come nearer. What is it?"

"It comes from the southeast. I don't know," he answered.

They rose and walked to the window. She was so near that he breathed the subtle fragrance of her hair, the fresh sweetness of her white gown, that rustled beside him.

"Hark!" whispered Lorraine; "I can almost hear voices in the breezes--the murmur of voices, as if millions of tiny people were calling us from the ends and outer edges of the earth."

"There is a throbbing, too. Do you notice it?"

"Yes--like one's heart at night. Ah, now it comes nearer--oh, nearer! nearer! Oh, what can it be?"

He knew now; he knew that indefinable battle--rumour that steals into the senses long before it is really audible. It is not a sound--not even a vibration; it is an immense foreboding that weights the air with prophecy.

"From the south and east," he repeated; "from the Landesgrenze."

"The frontier?"

"Yes. Hark!"

"I hear."

"From the frontier," he said again. "From the river Lauter and from Wissembourg."

"What is it?" she whispered, close beside him.

"Cannon!"

Yes, it was cannon--they knew it now--cannon throbbing, throbbing, throbbing along the horizon where the crags of the Geisberg echoed the dull thunder and shook it far out across the vineyards of Wissembourg, where the heights of Kapsweyer, resounding, hurled back the echoes to the mountains in the north.

"Why--why does it seem to come nearer?" asked Lorraine.

"Nearer?" He knew it had come nearer, but how could he tell her what that meant?

"It is a battle--is it not?" she asked again.

"Yes, a battle."

She said nothing more, but stood leaning along the wall, her white forehead pressed against the edge of the raised window-sash. Outside, the little birds had grown suddenly silent; there was a stillness that comes before a rain; the leaves on the shrubbery scarcely moved.

And now, nearer and nearer swelled the rumour of battle, undulating, quavering over forest and hill, and the muttering of the cannon grew to a rumble that jarred the air.

As currents in the upper atmosphere shift and settle north, south, east, west, so the tide of sound wavered and drifted, and set westward, flowing nearer and nearer and louder and louder, until the hoarse, crashing tumult, still vague and distant, was cut by the sharper notes of single cannon that spoke out, suddenly impetuous, in the dull din.

The whole Chateau was awake now; maids, grooms, valets, gardeners, and keepers were gathering outside the iron grille of the park, whispering together and looking out across the fields.

There was nothing to see except pastures and woods, and low-rounded hills crowned with vineyards. Nothing more except a single strangely shaped cloud, sombre, slender at the base, but spreading at the top like a palm.

"I am going up to speak to your father," said Jack, carelessly; "may I?"

Interrupt her father! Lorraine fairly gasped.

"Stay here," he added, with the faintest touch of authority in his tone; and, before she could protest, he had sped away up the staircase and round and round the long circular stairs that led to the single turret.

A little out of breath, he knocked at the door which faced the top step. There was no answer. He rapped again, impatiently. A voice startled him: "Lorraine, I am busy!"

"Open," called Jack; "I must see you!"

"I am busy!" replied the marquis. Irritation and surprise were in his tones.

"Open!" called Jack again; "there is no time to lose!"

Suddenly the door was jerked back and the marquis appeared, pale, handsome, his eyes cold and blue as icebergs.

"Monsieur Marche--" he began, almost discourteously.

"Pardon," interrupted Jack; "I am going into your room. I wish to look out of that turret window. Come also--you must know what to expect."

Astonished, almost angry, the Marquis de Nesville followed him to the turret window.

"Oh," said Jack, softly, staring out into the sunshine, "it is time, is it not, that we knew what was going on along the frontier? Look there!"

On the horizon vast shapeless clouds lay piled, gigantic coils and masses of vapour, dark, ominous, illuminated by faint, pallid lights that played under them incessantly; and over all towered one tall column of smoke, spreading above like an enormous palm-tree. But this was not all. The vast panorama of hill and valley and plain, cut by roads that undulated like narrow satin ribbons on a brocaded surface, was covered with moving objects, swarming, inundating the landscape. To the south a green hill grew black with the human tide, to the north long lines and oblongs and squares moved across the land, slowly, almost imperceptibly--but they were moving, always moving east.

"It is an army coming," said the marquis.

"It is a rout," said Jack, quietly.

The marquis moved suddenly, as though to avoid a blow.

"What troops are those?" he asked, after a silence.

"It is the French army," replied Jack. "Have you not heard the cannonade?"

"No--my machines make some noise when I'm working. I hear it now. What is that cloud--a fire?"

"It is the battle cloud."

"And the smoke on the horizon?"

"The smoke from the guns. They are fighting beyond Saarbrueck--yes, beyond Pfalzburg and Woerth; they are fighting beyond the Lauter."

"Wissembourg?"

"I think so. They are nearer now. Monsieur de Nesville, the battle has gone against the French."

"How do you know?" demanded the marquis, harshly.

"I have seen battles. One need only listen and look at the army yonder. They will pass Morteyn; I think they will pass for miles through the country. It looks to me like a retreat towards Metz, but I am not sure. The throngs of troops below are fugitives, not the regular geometrical figures that you see to the north. Those are regiments and divisions moving towards the west in good order."

The two men stepped back into the room and faced each other.

"After the rain the flood, after the rout the invasion," said Jack, firmly. "You cannot know it too quickly. You know it now, and you can make your plans."

He was thinking of Lorraine's safety when he spoke, but the marquis turned instinctively to a mass of machinery and chemical paraphernalia behind him.

"You will have your hands full," said Jack, repressing an angry sneer; "if you wish, my aunt De Morteyn will charge herself with Mademoiselle de Nesville's safety."

"True, Lorraine might go to Morteyn," murmured the marquis, absently, examining a smoky retort half filled with a silvery heap of dust.

"Then, may I drive her over after dinner?"

"Yes," replied the other, indifferently.

Jack started towards the stairs, hesitated, and turned around.

"Your inventions are not safe, of course, if the German army comes. Do you need my help?"

"My inventions are my own affair," said the marquis, angrily.

Jack flushed scarlet, swung on his heels, and marched out of the room and down the stairs. On the lower steps he met Lorraine's maid, and told her briefly to pack her mistress's trunks for a visit to Morteyn.

Lorraine was waiting for him at the window where he had left her, a scared, uncertain little maid in truth.

"The battle is very near, isn't it?" she asked.

"No, miles away yet."

"Did you speak to papa? Did he send word to me? Does he want me?"

He found it hard to tell her what message her father had sent, but he did.

"I am to go to Morteyn? Oh, I cannot! I cannot! Papa will be alone here!" she said, aghast.

"Perhaps you had better see him," he said, almost bitterly.

She hurried away up the stairs; he heard her little eager feet on the stone steps that led to the turret; climbing up, up, up, until the sound was lost in the upper stories of the house. He went out to the stables and ordered the dog-cart and a wagon for her trunks. He did not fear that this order might be premature, for he thought he had not misjudged the Marquis de Nesville. And he had not, for, before the cart was ready, Lorraine, silent, pale, tearless, came noiselessly down the stairs holding her little cloak over one arm.

"I am to stay a week," she said; "he does not want me." She added, hastily, "He is so busy and worried, and there is much to be done, and if the Prussians should come he must hide the balloon and the box of plans and formula--"

"I know," said Jack, tenderly; "it will lift a weight from his mind when he knows you are safe with my aunt."

"He is so good, he thinks only of my safety," faltered Lorraine.

"Come," said Jack, in a voice that sounded husky; "the horse is waiting; I am to drive you. Your maid will follow with the trunks this evening. Are you ready? Give me your cloak. There--now, are you ready?"

"Yes."

He aided her to mount the dog-cart--her light touch was on his arm. He turned to the groom at the horse's head, sprang to the seat, and nodded. Lorraine leaned back and looked up at the turret where her father was.

"Allons! En route!" cried Jack, cheerily, snapping his ribbon-decked whip.

At the same instant a horseless cavalryman, gray with dust and dripping with blood and sweat, staggered out on the road from among the trees. He turned a deathly face to theirs, stopped, tottered, and called out--"Jack!"

"Georges!" cried Jack, amazed.

"Give me a horse, for God's sake!" he gasped. "I've just killed mine. I--I must get to Metz by midnight--" _

Read next: Chapter 13. Aide-De-Camp

Read previous: Chapter 11. "Keep Thy Faith"

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