CHAPTER XXI
THE RUE DE L’ARC-EN-CIEL
He had left her at the gate of the gardens; but she did not seek her friends again, nor think of going home. Conscious of no guilt, her own silence was in itself as the accusation of a crime. In this man’s eyes she was condemned. He believed the worst; she had permitted him to believe it. All her surpassing love for Edmond had brought her but this as its reward—that a stranger should have the right thus to charge her. And she could not defend herself. A word would sacrifice the life of him who had laughed at the perils of the city that she might have news of her husband. The ultimate penalty of her folly—if folly it were—must be paid. Gatelet had spared the life of her friend because he believed the worst of their friendship. Any motive less strong would not have sealed his lips. Even her confusing logic taught her that. If Brandon were not to die as that other before the gates of the Minster, she must suffer the shame which his presence in Strasburg had put upon her. The very thought of it burned her as a fever. She passed through the city, heedless of the sights and sounds around her. She felt that she had no longer a home in that place. She shrank from men’s gaze and the touch of women.
It was growing late in the afternoon when she left the gardens. A new and strange activity was to be observed in the streets around her. By here and there groups of men discussed the great news, how that General von Werder himself was at Hausberge with two hundred field-pieces and many mortars to shell the northern ramparts of the city. Officers of the staff galloped recklessly through the narrow thoroughfares with despatches from the Governor to the citadel. Shopkeepers stood at the doors of their houses, and bewailed each other’s misfortunes. In the air above was a tremulous suggestion of distant sounds, of the roar of heavy artillery and the intervals of silence attendant. Once a man touched her upon the shoulder and counselled her to walk beneath the eaves of the houses.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “they have killed a woman to-day in the Rue du Bain aux Plantes. Take my advice, and do not walk in the open.”
She thanked him, and passed on. It was odd to be told that there was danger in the streets of that great city, to which she had fled for safety; yet neither the peril nor the warning remained in her thoughts. Again and again she heard the words which had been spoken—“he is still in Strasburg; he waits for you; go to him.” Her quick imagination depicted Brandon lying there, in the darkened room, helpless, alone, perchance even suffering. For her sake he had come to Strasburg; for her sake, to gratify her impatience, he had put his life into the hands of the man who had insulted her. And she could not reward the sacrifice. She must leave him alone still. She dare not go to the house. He had sealed her lips; she could ask counsel of none.
This reflection of her own helplessness and of Brandon’s peril pursued her without mercy. She feared to return to the Place Kleber, where she must hear old Hélène’s platitudes, and be questioned upon the trivial events of a trivial day. She would be alone, face to face with the change that a word had brought into her life. How different, she thought, were all things yesterday. Her secret had been her own then. She had looked upon Strasburg as a refuge and a home until Edmond should return to her. The city would never be that again. All the gathering terror of the siege affrighted her. The regiments marching, the rumbling guns, the galloping horses deafened her as with crashing noises. She shrank from the excited throngs; she feared every cry, every impulse of the crowds lest they should tell of a new spy brought to justice. Yet, in her own mind, she did not doubt for an instant the fidelity or the honour of the man who wished to serve her. Brandon was no spy. He was one who had recklessly staked his own life that he might keep his promise to her. And he was in peril. She repeated the word always. An hour might bring discovery and death. She was the one friend who knew of his presence in the city; and she might not see him. What woman’s logic made such a law for her she could not explain. But she held to her idea tenaciously, and, maintaining it, she turned into the square before the Minster and entered the great church itself.
There were many in the nave and chapels of the cathedral, praying at the altars for those who served France, or had died in her service. Fantastic lights streamed down through the glorious windows, and shed a lustre of crimson and green and violet upon the sunbeams which lingered yet in the first hour of evening. From without, a murmur was to be heard, as of squadrons tramping and the voices of many men. Ever and anon, even those mighty walls trembled as the thunder of the cannonade rolled heavily upon the distant horizon of hill and vineyard. But no voice was raised to mar the majestic silence within the splendid church; and it seemed to Beatrix, as she knelt for a few moments in the chapel of St. John, that here, at least, was the abiding place of God’s peace, here the haven which the city gave her no longer.
“Oh, my God, help me—help me to save him!”
She had no other prayer. The vulgar dictates of prudence and the customs could not prevail in that sanctuary, where the counsel of love and sacrifice was the daily word. Gradually, as her mind began to gather up its little threads of argument, her woman’s nature conquered her. She told herself that she was a coward for deserting the man whose peril was of her own making. No love, she argued, would justify a requital so base. And Brandon was an Englishman, alone there, lamed, helpless among those who would consider themselves his enemies. Well she knew that if her husband were in the city, he would be the first to go to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel. He had no friend in all Strasburg whom he had trusted as he trusted Brandon North, the Englishman. When he heard her story, he might well charge her with the betrayal and desertion of his friend and comrade. And, she asked herself, was her own love to be the sport of every coward who chose to spy upon her? She had shame of the thought that Gatelet’s innuendos had been anything but a matter of scornful indifference to her. She would tell Edmond, when he returned, would tell him all; the debt should be repaid. And she would go to the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel. She was determined upon that now. Brandon must have a friend to help him. He might even lack common necessaries. A woman’s pity for one who suffered was the final argument. She left the church with beating heart, and turned her face toward the house which harboured her friend.
It was almost dark then. A lurid glow of wavering crimson light hovered in the sky to the northward and the eastward. She knew that the shells were falling there, that there lay the terror of which men spoke in hushed voices. Everywhere the people were seeking the shelter of house or café; soldiers alone moved in the deserted streets. Many of them black with powder, many fresh from the ramparts, a few drunk and reeling, they gave her coarse greeting or even laid rough hands upon her. But she continued unflinchingly, thinking always that Brandon was waiting for her, or, it might be, accusing that ingratitude which detained her. When, some little way from the cathedral, a shell struck a house above her with a great crash, and masonry fell heavily upon the pavement at her very feet she shrank back terrified into the porch of the house, but abated nothing of her resolution. She could hear the screams of the people in the rooms upstairs; she beheld a wrecked apartment, the walls shattered, the roof pierced, the fire raging in the débris—but no thought of sorrow for the people or of their necessity detained her. Rather she fled from the gaping crowd that gathered quickly in the street, for she feared that someone would follow her—some word of hers betray her errand. When she entered the Rue de l’Arc-en-Ciel she was trembling still with the excitement of her own escape; but a new courage came to her, and it was born of the sure knowledge that Brandon North was there, and that she was about to hear his voice again.
There was a great throng of people in the narrow street, all gathered about the shop of a chemist into which a little child had been carried some few minutes before she came there. A gossip elbowing a road for himself through the press, told her that a shell had fallen in that place, and that the child had been struck on the arm by a fragment of it.
“We shall have to go to the cellars to-morrow,” the man said grimly; “they shoot the little ones, these Prussians; they have no hearts, Mademoiselle. I have children of my own, and I can speak for the fathers. It is not war which covers a child’s frock with blood. It is the slaughter-house full of devils in blue coats. Be advised of me and return to your house, Mademoiselle.”
“She shrank back terrified into the porch.”
She thanked him and asked boldly for the house of Madame Clairon. He looked at her, astonished. Her fine clothes, her grand air, the sweet girlish face she lifted when she asked the question were not to be reconciled with such a request.
“The house of Madame Clairon; but she is an aubergiste—she keeps the wine shop yonder. You cannot have business there, Mademoiselle.”
His curiosity was now thoroughly aroused. Everyone suspected his neighbour in Strasburg at that day. What had this delicate girl to do with Madame Clairon and her house? Beatrix, on her part, found an excuse quickly.
“We have news of one of her relations in a letter from Metz, Monsieur. I did not know that it was such a house. Of course, I cannot go there.”
She turned abruptly and disappeared in the throng. The questioning eyes of the man followed her as she went. She seemed to be conscious of his searching gaze as though it pursued her to read her secret and to betray it. But she saw him no more, and, as she passed the chemist’s house, they carried out the child, a wan little thing with eyes very wide open and bandaged arm, and blood upon the frock. She turned from the place sick at heart. An infinite pity for the children drove the thought of her own troubles from her mind. That those little ones should suffer! The lights of the wine shop were dancing before her eyes. She saw the child’s face still when she passed on into the darkness of the street.
The crowd dispersed slowly, leaving but a few idlers upon the pavement. She could not see the man who had questioned her, but suspicion of him remained. Nearly an hour passed before she returned to the auberge, and then she had no courage to enter it. Burly troopers, grimed with powder and half drunk, lolled everywhere about its doors. The odour of dregs and of stale tobacco, wafted even to the pavements without, made her sick and faint. She passed the doors again and again until she began to fear that her very presence was a danger to the man she would have befriended. And he was there—in that den of drink and brutality. She knew that she could not leave him in such a place.
A young girl came out of the auberge, singing. Her arms were bare, her hair unkempt; but she gave the troopers wit for brutality, and there was a smile upon her bright face as she ran from the house. When she saw Beatrix standing there, as though about to question her, she stopped abruptly and uttered a startled exclamation.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, it is you, then!”
She turned and looked up and down the street, and then continued quickly:
“He has asked for you, oh, so many times every day. He is very ill, Mademoiselle, and has no friends in Strasburg. If anyone knew that he was an Englishman from across the Rhine, he could not stay here. But you will see him now. The door is to the right there, the first past the corner. I will let you in myself: I have done what I could, but these others—they keep me always on my feet. It is ‘Jeannette’ here and ‘Jeannette’ there, and ‘Jeannette will do it’—and, oh, Mademoiselle, how tired I am!”
She made a gesture as of one very weary of her life, but a moment afterwards was in the café again with smiling face and with ready words for the brutes who bandied their wit against hers. When she opened the side door to Beatrix she had a candlestick in her hand, and she raised her finger warningly.
“We must have a care, Mademoiselle. They are not all his friends as you and I. And he will be so pleased! Ah, it is good to be loved when you are ill!”
She did not see the flush on the other’s face, the flush of shame and doubt and of denial, which could not well be spoken in that place. Indeed, she did not wait for assent or protest, but ran up the stairs with a child’s foot, and opened the door of a garret upon the third floor. And so the friends came face to face again.
“Ah, Monsieur—here is Mademoiselle at last. No more loneliness now, Monsieur; no more Jeannette. We are going to change all that. Shall we come in, Monsieur?”
A deep voice, clear and musical, replied to them. Beatrix entered the room with hesitating step, and stood for a little while, breathing quickly in the close atmosphere. That was the friendship of Louis Gatelet, then—that den of dirt, that hovel in the auberge; that garret from which even a trooper below might have turned scornfully. The very windows she saw were broken and mended with paper. The couch upon which the wounded man lay was but a bed of rags. A single candle in a dirty iron stick gave him light. The flickering rays of it showed her the pallor of his face, the thin hands, the unshaven chin. And he had been there for days, waiting for her to come to him. His friend had left him there in that garret of the city, which even a beggar would have passed by. She blamed herself that she had delayed even for an hour.
“Oh, my God, Brandon, what a place! You cannot stop here.”
He pressed her hand lightly, and made an effort to raise himself from the couch.
“That’s what I’ve been telling my leg every day for the last two days. But it differs from me. I say ‘go;’ the leg says ‘stop.’ Who is to decide when the limbs disagree?”
Jeannette set down the candle and sighed.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, if you could have seen him when he came here. That was a dreadful day. I went from the house and found him lying in the road—ah, mon Dieu, the dreadful wound, the pale face, the blood upon the pavement! But he will get better now. You will cure him, Mademoiselle. And you will not want Jeannette to help you. Oh—ah—I know how it is, Mademoiselle, and I will come back in an hour.”
She slipped from the room, and closed the door quietly behind her. The room possessed but one cane-seated chair, and that but half a back. Beatrix drew it to the side of the couch, while Brandon began to speak to her about his accident.
“I don’t like your coming here, and yet I am glad that you came,” he said, with a look which implied the disappointment he had suffered. “Of course, you must tell somebody now, and must not come alone again. Old Hélène will be best. She is a good old soul, and may be prevailed upon to hold her tongue. If only I knew where Richard Watts was living, I would ask you to go to him. He has a better head than most, and would help me out of a tight place. It just shows you, Beatrix, what fools men can be sometimes. Bobbie Burns was right after all. The best laid schemes don’t always hit it. There was nothing I left out of my calculations that you could think of. I had even got a safe-conduct to help me back to German lines. And then, just at the crossing here, an artillery waggon crushes my foot, and down I go like a nettle. Was there ever such a cursed piece of luck?”
He sank back again upon the pillow of rags, and a spasm of pain drew down the muscles of his mouth and made him clench his hands. She thought how greatly the wound had changed him. His coat hung limply upon his chest; the hand that he stretched out showed awkward knuckles, and skin drawn tight; his eyes were very bright, as the eyes of one who needed sleep. But his manner was the manner of the old time. He was angry with himself because he could not conceal from her the fact that he was in pain.
“It’s nothing,” he said, when he saw her eyes fill with tears, and guessed how heavy was her self-reproach. “If you wouldn’t mind pouring me out a glass of that wine—a hundred thanks; you’re curing me already, you know. And, of course, I dare not send to my old rooms. Antoine, there, has a tongue as long as the Minster spire. He would give me away in five minutes. You see, there’s not much chance of disguise now, Beatrix. Gatelet says he got me in here only just in time. One of the curates of St. Thomas’s, who knew me well, came to the door just as they were carrying me upstairs. The fellow would have put it all over Strasburg in five minutes. It’s their business to talk, and they don’t neglect it. Gatelet, on the other hand, will hold his tongue just as long as it suits him. How long it will suit him I really don’t know. It’s a case of trusting in Providence and a fifth-rate Italian quack he unearthed from somewhere. Perhaps it will be better now that you have come. And you might find Richard Watts, eh?”
She had been very silent until that moment, for pity and dismay checked her utterances. All her impulse was to flee the house and return with someone who would carry him from that dreadful place. His very life, she thought, depended upon her, and upon her alone. She knew not what enemies of his watched this den. Even as they talked, she listened for any sound of footsteps on the stairs. The cries and oaths in the wine shop below brought back to her that picture of a man fighting for his life in the cathedral square. If it should come to that? If Gatelet should betray them?
“Brandon,” she said, ignoring his question, “what did your friend mean by leaving you in this place?”
He laughed satirically.
“Oh, his magnanimity—nothing else—that’s what brought me here. You could fill an eggcup with it. By-and-by the honour of France will compel him to win glory by introducing me to the gentlemen below. They are the fellows who ran away from us at Wörth. They showed us the soles of their boots, which are made of brown paper, I believe. Here, in Strasburg, they are the very devil. When Gatelet tells them that there is a Prussian dragoon in the garret, they will come up, three stairs at a time, with sabres in their hands. I fancy I hear them sometimes when I try to sleep. It isn’t quite a cure for insomnia, and, yet, what can I do? There’s no man in Strasburg, except Richard Watts, that I could trust—and, well, Watts may not be in Strasburg. Besides, the place is watched. I have seen men in the house opposite, and there is always some blackguard at the front door below. If I charged Gatelet with it, he would swell out with indignation. And, fancy owing anything to a rat like that! If only it had been someone else! Of course, he told you I was here.”
“To-day,” she said absently, for her brain was working quickly now; “I came straight here from the Minster. He insulted me, Brandon. I cannot speak of it. I am going now to tell Hélène. It would not be right to keep the secret any longer. If Mr. Watts is in the city, he shall know to-night. We cannot leave you one hour longer in this dreadful place. Oh, I pray God that I shall find him! My folly brought you here—nothing else, nothing else!”
She stood up and the tears fell fast and glistened upon her burning cheeks. The man thought that her tenderness for him was the sweetest thing in all the world; his love for her surged up in his heart as a consuming passion. Yet he would sooner have cut off his right hand than that she should have guessed the heavy secret of his lonely life. The unbending honour of a man who had been honour’s servant from his boyhood answered her almost brusquely.
“It was not your fault at all,” he said; “you don’t drive artillery waggons, my dear Beatrix. And I am glad that you are going to tell old Hélène. She is the best woman alive when anyone is down. Perhaps she’ll smuggle in some soup or something. The food here is not exactly on the restaurant scale. But don’t let her trouble if she can’t do it safely—and remember we are all going to write to Edmond and to tell him about this business directly it’s possible. Your other letter went, I need not say. I smuggled it out all right, and he’s on his way home by this time.”
She looked at him, half glad, half fearful.
“You sent the letter?”
“Of course I sent it. The girl here gave it to one of the German gentlemen who are visiting Strasburg just now to take the waters—and anything else they can pick up. Edmond will give his parole, although you don’t ask him. He’ll be back here just as the fun is beginning. I should imagine my appearance will amuse him. You must tell him all about it; that goes without saying. And you won’t return here until he is in the Place Kleber. I insist on that, Beatrix. If anyone is to come, it must be Watts. By Jove, I should be glad to see his face, and I don’t think he’d mind seeing mine.”
It was the third time he had mentioned the name of the old Bohemian, and she began to see how great he believed the peril of his environment to be. There, in that wretched hovel, with the dim light of a guttering candle playing upon his haggard face, and strangers about him, and the very scum of France’s soldiers in the tavern below, lamed, helpless, alone—she knew that his life hung upon a thread indeed; and she gave him of that pity which ever she bestowed upon the weak and suffering.
“They shall come and help you, Brandon. I will go and tell old Hélène. God grant that we shall not be too late.”
“Amen to that, Beatrix—and a thousand thanks.”
She pressed his hand lightly and left the room, groping her way down the rotting stairs to the light and voices of the city below. She told herself that she was going to save the life of her friend. But the man sank back upon his bed of rags, and, seeing the vision of her long afterwards, he thought that the sun shone upon him still; and he forgot the place and the hour, and seemed to walk with her in a house of dreams, which he had built in the years gone by.