Читать книгу Adventure Tales 6 - H. Bedford-Jones - Страница 6

THE MIRACLE, by John D. Swain

I

For hours we had ridden across desolate Champagne, our horses picking their way over the pockmarked terrain, littered with the incredible debris of a race of degenerates possessing the strength of men coupled with the wanton destructiveness of children.

The heat of afternoon gave way to the cool breath of evening; the sun set in a fantastic smear of crimson and gold, and the more brilliant stars crept forth from a dome of lapis lazuli. Presently the moon, at the full, rose in almost artificial splendor. Back home they were speaking of it as the “harvest moon.” Here the only harvest was that of death, desolation, and despair.

Seen beneath its amber light the picture changed from a landscape in brilliant oils to an etching in monstrous blacks and whites. It was as if we were crossing the ghostly contour of some dead planet. The battle line, stilled by the armistice, was well beyond—the returning tide of scattered inhabitants far to the rear. We were alone in a land at once empty and silent.

Here and there an object caught my eye, and I guided my mount aside to identify it. Once it was the sparkle of moonshine from the staring eyes of a doll. Again, it was a crucifix, the wooden figure hacked and defiled. A broken iron pot lay beside a fifteenth-century missal, painfully transcribed and illuminated by some forgotten monk during slow creeping years. A torn placard affixed to a wall announced a boche beer-drinking contest. Beside it was the impaled body of a kitten—a mere scrap of moldering fur.

Oftener there was nothing identifiable: houses had been wrecked and leveled, and then seemingly brayed in giant mortars, that there might remain nothing save dust, to be blown away by the wind and worked up into mud, by the rain—to disappear utterly from the face of the earth and the very memories of men.

We rode in silence for the most part, Lieutenant Paradis and I, depressed by the bleak and artificial desert created by man in one of the garden spots of Europe.

It was then a weird and startling sight which suddenly materialized before our eyes from the fog-wraiths which clung to a winding river—nothing less than a perfectly preserved little town in the midst of all the woeful wreckage.

Not absolutely untouched, of course; looking sharp, one observed where a corner of the church belfry had gone, and here and there a gaping hole where a home had stood, but practically intact, even the stained-glass in the church and most of the humble panes of its shops unbroken.

Here it stood, as if left for a solitary specimen of the vanished villages of Champagne.

If any such purpose had spared it one could have wished that some other town might have been chosen in its place—for Breaux was unknown to the tourist, it possessed no famous edifice, no supreme example of medieval craftsmanship.

Still, marvelously sweet, it looked sleeping amid its filmy draperies of vapor, beneath the full moon, with its one principal street widening to a civic center where stood the church, the two inns, the town hall, and on whose cobbled pave had for centuries raged no battle fiercer than that of its bare-headed, wooden-shod market women over the prices of fat geese and luscious grapes.

It was silent and deserted as our tired horses clumped through it; I noted especially a little wine-shop, with its sign still in its place over the door, its square bottles still in orderly array upon the shelf behind the copper counter.

That the boches should have spared the church and the tavern answered all queries as to the condition of the other buildings. Breaux had been spared. But why?

We passed abruptly from it to open country, as one does in France, with no tailing off, such as our suburbs reveal. The town ended as if cut off with a giant’s knife. A little way beyond I turned in my saddle for a parting glance.

Breaux stood between us and the moon now; and, its nearly horizontal beams striking through the windows and portals, it was as if the entire village was ablaze for some silent and ghostly festival, some voiceless triumph.

Lieutenant Paradis answered the question in my eyes, speaking for the first time in hours.

“It is the town which was saved by miracle,” he said. “By the Colonel Eugen Etienne Ste. Marie de Voulx, late of Napoleon’s Young Guard, who rose from the dead to preserve the home of his ancestors.”

“A miracle?” I responded vaguely. “Ah—yes, like the Angel of Mons and the Christ seen at night upon the battle-fields easing the souls of dying men!”

For some moments Paradis did not speak; and when he did it was not to refer at once and directly to the miracle of Breaux.

“Concerning these things who knows? Not I! I neither believe nor disbelieve. But always, in world crises, these reports are current. It was so when Greeks fought Trojans. And do you recall that when the Turks took Constantinople the wretched people sought refuge in their cathedral, and as the enemy burst in upon them there and began slaughtering young and old, women and children, the priest, who was in the midst of celebrating mass, bore the sacred elements out through a little door in the apse; and the Turks sealed it up, and so it has remained unto this day in the mosque of Ste. Sophia.

“And it is said that on the day when it shall be reconsecrated as a Christian church the little door shall open and the celebrant come forth and resume the canon of the mass, at the point where it was so bloodily interrupted centuries ago.”

We crossed the brook by a ford since its bridge had been blown up, and as we clambered up the bank Paradis continued:

“So, in our own war men say that on a certain night when a gap was torn in our lines, a ragged hole open to Calais, and there were no more troops to throw in, there rose silently from the mists strange men in great bearskin shakos, wearing obsolete bandoliers, and carrying clumsy muskets.

‘“At their head, upon a gray horse, rode a gray figure, bowed forward in thought, one hand thrust into his breast, a cocked hat upon his head. It was, to be sure, the Little Corporal, risen from the dead to hurl his grizzled Old Guard upon the desecrators of French soil.

“At any rate, the gap was stopped, nobody knows how or by whom. A division rushed up by lorries found no one, friend or foe, when they arrived at dawn—only the waves of dead men as the tide had ebbed and flowed. Myself? I believe that when mankind is in travail, an anguish too great to be borne alone, it flies to Deity as a child to its mother’s skirt, or as chicks to the maternal wing.

“It is inconceivable, intolerable, that God should look down a mere spectator upon their agony as from a celestial grandstand. And so there are portents in the sky, and gods fighting with men, and legends passing from one to another the children of hope and fear.”

“Merely legends?” I asked.

Lieutenant Paradis shrugged.

“Who can say? Let me repeat what a great philosopher has written: That with so many hundreds of thousands of lusty young souls cut off instantly and in the full sway of the most violent passions, it is inconceivable that they should at once go to their abiding place; rather must the earth be girdled by a stratum of spiritual unrest, reacting upon our minds in many singular and mysterious ways.”

Under the waning stars, and to the solemn accompaniment of the slow-coming dawn, Paradis related to me the miracle whereby De Voulx, though long asleep in his coffin, returned to save the village of his forebears from the slime of the green-gray German horde.

* * * *

Three men sat about a little table in the sacristy of the old parish church of St. Leu in Breaux. It was early fall, the third year of the great war; and save for these three there remained no living inhabitant in the town. All had departed, bearing with them such valuables as could be gathered up before the German onrush.

For days the unfortunates from scores of similar villages to the eastward had streamed through Breaux, pausing long enough to rest for an hour and to whisper of the unspeakable woe that had overtaken their homes.

Breaux was an ancient town, but one never looming large in the pages of history. Its one seignorial family, that of De Voulx, had produced no scions of the first rank. They had been provincial lordlings, stepping high upon the cobbled streets of the town dominated by their rambling château, but seeming ill at ease whenever they, on rare occasions, journeyed to Versailles.

By and large they had dealt wisely and kindly with their tenants and retainers. One of them had saved the town from sack during the Spanish wars. Tradition had it that the very earliest of the name had beaten back the marauding bands of Teutons.

The last of his line, Colonel Eugen, one-time commander of Napoleon’s Young Guard, seems to have been a pompous, fussy little man, of no particular ability but unquestioned courage. He was considered to bear some slight resemblance to the great commander himself: a likeness he did nothing to minimize by his dress, carriage, and demeanor.

He died in Breaux upon returning from the siege of Acre; and,in his last delirium, had risen in his bed and remarked in his most characteristic manner that if ever Breaux were in danger of capture they had but to open his sepulchre and he would come forth and save the town, even as the De Voulx overlords had ever preserved it inviolate.

Whereupon he fittingly died without spoiling his utterance by an anticlimax; and he lay in a leaden coffin in the vault of St. Leu, beneath the feet of the three solitary citizens of Breaux, who were, in fact, discussing him in the sacristy lighted by a pair of great altar candles.

The curé, Father Jean, had remained to secure the jeweled ciborium containing the consecrated host and the parish register, together with such portable relics as he could save. Across from him sat M. Pelletier, a heavy, red-faced man with beard cut square like a spade, and who, as mayor, had busied himself securing certain of the town records.

The third was of peasant type, with a face cross-hatched with innumerable lines indicative of honesty, shrewdness, and obstinacy in equal proportions.

It was he, the grandson of the orderly of the late Colonel de Voulx, who was addressing the other two, the big men of his little world, whom he sought to coerce with his dogged persistence, accompanied by many shrugs, outthrustings of palms, elevating of brows, and clicks of his tongue against the roof of his toothless mouth.

“It is I who tell you, mon père, and you, monsieur le maire, I who had the story from my grandsire (whom the blessed saints have in their keeping!), and after him, from my father, also a pious Christian. It has been kept in our family as a sacred trust. Pardieu! For just such an occasion as this, messieurs! For, as he lay dying, his soul already straining at the halter, if you will permit the saying, mon père—”

The aged priest raised his hand. Both he and Pelletier, and indeed every one in Breaux, down to the gamins who played about its one street, knew the story by heart.

“The minds of dying men wander in blind paths, my son! If I were to consider all the pitiful last words to which I have listened here in our parish during the last half century—”

The old man interrupted him impatiently.

“Of a surety! My own blessed father called for his pipe—and he had not used tobacco for twenty years. But one is to distinguish between the babbling of a simple peasant and the inspired prophecy of a great one like a De Voulx, whose ancestors have preserved this our town since history was written!”

Father Jean smiled faintly.

“Pierre, my son, it is not meet that we should violate the grave of one given sepulture according to the rites of the church, merely to disprove an old wives’ tale.”

Pierre fairly sputtered with indignation; and ere he could find his tongue again the third man, the Mayor Pelletier, opened his firm lips for the first time.

“You know, begging your pardon, monsieur le curé, for whom I have only love and respect, and you, friend Pierre, that I am an atheist. Religion harms no one—and doubtless consoles old women. As for me, when I die you may serve me as you will. I am dead for all time—as dead as my faithful old dog Bidou, and less worthy of immortality!

“No more than I believe in Father Jean’s rites do I credit good Pierre’s miracles. We do wrong to waste time here. We are custodians of town property. At any moment the Huns may clatter down our street. I haven’t the least superstitious fear against opening our eminent towns-man’s leaden casket—but I see no sense in taking time to do so!”

Pierre waved his knotted hands frantically.

“Name of a name of God! You don’t see, and you don’t believe, and you this and that! How could Colonel de Voulx, with his last breath, bid us commit a sacrilege upon himself, and he a good Christian, shriven by the pious Père Hyacinthe, your predecessor, my father? And you, monsieur, why waste in empty words time enough to open his coffin twice over? See!”

Pierre drew from his blouse a keen adz and brandished it.

“It is made sharp for biting into the lead! If indeed Colonel de Voulx spoke idly; no harm can come of it; do not the thrice accursed boches open every sealed coffin of the blessed dead, seeking for jewels? And think you they will spare this one?”

Father Jean glanced half-humorously, half-sadly into the steady eyes of Pelletier and shrugged helplessly. The latter spoke.

“There are no miracles. There never were! But there are always facts; and one of them is this: the German cavalry will snap us up like trout while we argue here, and with us the records, and that jeweled gewgaw you value so highly, Père Jean!”

Pierre rallied for his final argument. He controlled his excitement with a violent effort.

“Listen, then! It is true that you have heard my story many times. It is true that every breeched lad in Breaux knows it by heart. And I, Pierre, tell you they also believe it And when they shall return, some day, and, fumbling amid the ashes and broken glass, shall seek to trace that place where once burned their hearth fires, think you they shall not say: ‘If only Père Jean, and that donkey of a Pelletier, and old doddering Pierre had but summoned forth Colonel de Voulx from his tomb, Breaux would have been saved!’”

He leaned back, the breath whistling between his grinning lips, his shrewd, puckered old eyes, bright and black still, triumphantly seeking theirs.

Abruptly the priest rose, taking one of the candles in his hand.

“Come!” he said. “The thing shall be done, that my poor people may know that our thought was for them and their firesides, even if that thought be impious, which the good God forbid!”

Pelletier said no more, but, accompanied by Pierre hearing his adz, followed the priest through a little door, down a narrow stone stair, into the crypt of the old church beneath the altar.

Here slept the few notables of Breaux: a long line of De Voulxs, the departed incumbents of the parish of St. Leu, a locally famous avocat, half a dozen others deemed worthy of internment here. Conspicuous among them, the great casket of Colonel Eugen Etienne Ste. Marie de Voulx, the soft lead deep bitten by a die of the Napoleonic bee, many times repeated, and one terse line beneath his name: “Of the Young Guard.”

The place was cool and dry, and the home of many shadows, pursued hither and thither as the great candle held by Père Jean moved in his nervous grasp.

Wasting no time, for there was none to be wasted, old Pierre swung his keen adz surely, and it sank into the lead casing. Matching each succeeding cut with the skill of a forester, he proceeded entirely around the casket, and in a surprisingly short time motioned to the others that he had finished the first part of his task—whereupon they jointly and with difficulty eased the heavy lid to the floor. Underneath was discovered a perfectly sound oak coffin.

From this, too, but without removing it from the outer casing, Pierre pried off the top—and behold! Before them lay the late colonel of the Young Guard in a surprisingly good state of preservation, although his face was swollen and nearly black. Still, one might trace a hint of the likeness to the great Napoleon, so sedulously cultivated by the old soldier.

He was dressed in full uniform: blue, swallow-tailed coat with broad revers and tarnished brass buttons and epaulets, gloved hands crossed over his sheathed sword, cocked hat by his side, long-spurred cavalry boots upon his bandy legs. A row of medals was strung across his breast.

The three men stared at him in breathless silence. The curé and Pierre crossed themselves; Pelletier gravely touched his forehead in respectful salute. Whatever their various ideas, in one particular they felt alike. Here before them, visible to the naked eye, lay one of the officers of a famous and unbeaten regiment of the great military genius of their beloved country.

So absorbed were they, Pierre with his hopes, Father Jean with his apprehensions, the mayor with his respectful interest, that they failed to hear upon the cobbled street above the faint clatter of the advance force of Uhlans, riding cautiously into Breaux; failed to hear them as, having dismounted, they followed the tiny candle gleam down into the crypt, and were shocked into a numb terror only when the captain of Uhlans, in excellent French, addressed them mockingly as he advanced through the stairway door.

“So! It is that Frenchmen rifle the graves of their own dead, that they may afterward cry out upon the German ghouls! The good pastor, too!”

His teeth showing in a wolfish smile, his monocle fixed, one hand at the automatic in his belt, the officer advanced within the circle of light, followed by several of his staff, and, craning forward, gazed upon that which had so riveted the attention of the three Frenchmen.

“You are wrong, my son,” Père Jean replied with dignity. “There are no valuables in these, our poor tombs, save the honored dead they hold!”

The Uhlan stared insolently upon him.

“Perhaps you will then explain the trouble to which you put yourself in opening this casket?”

“I will do so,” Père Jean responded with quiet nobility of demeanor. “Tradition in our little town has it that this son of the Church and of France, and one-time officer of the great Napoleon, would, if brought from his sepulcher, save Breaux in its day of need from impious hands, even, as his ancestors did in ancient times.”

The officer laughed harshly.

“And your theology swallows these children’s’ fairy tales, worthy pastor?”

The mayor, Pelletier, answered him.

“Neither he nor I, but this descendant of De Voulx’s orderly. To humor a good and faithful citizen we assented. That is all.”

The German rubbed his hands gleefully.

“Well, well! And why not? Let us see if there be any truth in it. Come forth, my Gallic Lazarus! Save thy ugly hamlet of Breaux! Many prettier towns have gone up in smoke this past week.”

Then began a scene such as no other war but this could match. The Uhlan’s Teutonic sense of humor rose to the surface. After an orgy of blood and rapine the surfeited beast chose to be good-naturedly facetious for the moment.

Obeying a curt command, two big cavalrymen laid hold upon Dc Voulx, and twitched him from the wooden bed where he had slept so long. They held him erect, clapped his cocked hat upon his head; then, their captain catching the travesty of the emperor in the bloated features, he bent one arm—the brittle bone cracking sharply—and thrust the hand within his breast. His sword was buckled on; the officer saluted him mockingly, hailed him as “kamerad!” and, entering into the spirit of the occasion, the gruesome figure was pushed and pulled about, complimented upon his winning so many medals as colonel of so distinguished a regiment, and then kicked and buffeted for failing to reply to the queries or to return the salutes.

It was to be noted that throughout the incredible buffoonery the little figure of De Voulx seemed to maintain an unshaken dignity which no insult could degrade. Dead this century and more, the deathless panoply of birth and character never for an instant failed to make cheap and bestial his living mockers!

Meanwhile Père Jean had been twitching at the sleeves of his two companions, and step by stealthy step, moving backward toward the little door, they slipped up the crooked stairs, and through the sacristy, and out into the black night, sick at heart, and with the uncouth shouts of the Uhlans sounding fainter and fainter in their horrified ears.

This was the story that Lieutenant Paradis told me as we rode away from Breaux; and at this point we reined up for a final back-flung look at it.

The moon was riding high in the heavens now; and beneath its rays the little town seemed a fragile toy, fabricated of beaten silver.

“Yet you have not told me,” I complained, “what really saved Breaux?”

“Colonel Eugen Etienne Ste. Marie de Voulx saved it!” replied my guide.

“But—but how—”

He turned and looked me in the eye.

“A miracle, so they are already saying. So say I—for of such stuff are dreams and miracles made! De Voulx, as has been learned by painstaking investigation of contemporary records, died of the black death, the germs of which he brought home with him from Asia. His orderly, who had served long in the East, recognized the symptoms, and warned the physician who attended De Voulx and the priest who shrived him.

“He was able to prevent them from contracting the plague, and it was by his advice that the body was hermetically sealed in lead and the secret kept from the village.

“When the casket was opened the germs were still virulent, still lying in wait. None of the three Frenchmen touched the body; but the Uhlans, who did, contracted the black death by contagion; and when the German Medical Staff learned the truth, and had cremated their numerous victims, they drew a circle about Breaux, forbidding, under severest penalties, any crossing of the dead line. And as this order was not countermanded, De Voulx kept his promise, and Breaux stands inviolate today!”