Читать книгу The Maids of Paradise - Robert W. Chambers - Страница 13

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There was a small company of people gathered at a table which stood in the cool shadows of the château’s eastern wing. Towards these people my companion directed her steps; I saw her bend close to the ear of a young girl who had already turned to look at me. At the same instant a heavily built, handsome man pushed back his chair and stood up, regarding me steadily through his spectacles, one hand grasping the back of the seat from which he had risen.

Presently the young girl to whom my companion of the morning had whispered rose gracefully and came toward me.

Slender, yet with that charming outline of body which youth wears as a promise, she moved across the terrace in her flowing robe of crape, and welcomed me with a gesture and a pleasant word, which I scarcely heard, so stupidly I stood, silenced by the absolute loveliness of the girl. Did I say loveliness? No, not that, but something newer, something far more fresh, far sweeter, that made mere physical beauty a thing less vital than the colorless shadow of a crystal.

She was not only beautiful, she was Beauty itself, incarnate, alive, soul and body. Later I noticed that she was badly sun-burned under the eyes, that her delicate nose was adorned by an adorable freckle, and that 35 she had red hair. … Could this be the Countess de Vassart? What a change!

I stepped forward to meet her, and took off my forage-cap.

“Is it true, monsieur, that you have come to arrest us?” she asked, in a low voice.

“Yes, madame,” I replied, already knowing that she was the Countess. She hesitated; then:

“Will you tell me your name? I am Madame de Vassart.”

Cap in hand I followed her to the table, where the company had already risen. The young Countess presented me with undisturbed simplicity; I bowed to my turkey-girl, who proved, after all, to be the actress from the Odéon, Sylvia Elven; then I solemnly shook hands with Dr. Leo Delmont, Professor Claude Tavernier, and Monsieur Bazard, ex-instructor at the Fontainebleau Artillery School, whom I immediately recognized as the snipe-faced notary I had met on the road.

“Well, sir,” exclaimed Dr. Delmont, in his deep, hearty voice, “if this peaceful little community is come under your government’s suspicion, I can only say, Heaven help France!”

“Is not that what we all say in these times, doctor?” I asked.

“When I say ‘Heaven help France!’ I do not mean Vive l’Empereur!’ ” retorted the big doctor, dryly.

Professor Tavernier, a little, gray-headed savant with used-up eyes, asked me mildly if he might know why they all were to be expelled from France. I did not reply.

“Is thought no longer free in France?” asked Dr. Delmont, in his heavy voice.

“Thought is free in France,” I replied, “but its expression is sometimes inadvisable, doctor.” 36

“And the Emperor is to be the judge of when it is advisable to express one’s thoughts?” inquired Professor Tavernier.

“The Emperor,” I said, “is generous, broad-minded, and wonderfully tolerant. Only those whose attitude incites to disorder are held in check.”

“According to the holy Code Napoléon,” observed Professor Tavernier, with a shrug.

“The code kills the body, Napoleon the soul,” said Dr. Delmont, gravely.

“It was otherwise with Victor Noir,” suggested Mademoiselle Elven.

“Yes,” added Delmont, “he asked for justice and they gave him … Pierre!”

“I think we are becoming discourteous to our guest, gentlemen,” said the young Countess, gently.

I bowed to her. After a moment I said: “Doctor, if you do truly believe in that universal brotherhood which apparently even tolerates within its boundaries a poor devil of the Imperial Police, if your creed really means peace and not violence, suffering and patience, not provocation and revolt, demonstrate to the government by the example of your submission to its decrees that the theories you entertain are not the chimeras of generous but unbalanced minds.”

“We never had the faintest idea of resisting,” said Monsieur Bazard, the notary, otherwise the Chevalier de Grey, a lank, hollow-eyed young fellow, already marked heavily with the ravages of pulmonary disease. But the fierce glitter in his eyes gave the lie to his words.

“Yesterday, Madame la Comtesse,” I said, turning to the Countess de Vassart, “the Emperor could easily afford to regard with equanimity the movement in which you are associated. To-day that is no longer possible.”

The young Countess gave me a bewildered look. 37

“Is it true,” she asked, “that the Emperor does not know we have severed all connection with the Internationale?”

“If that is so,” said I, “why does Monsieur Bazard return across the fields to warn you of my coming? And why do you harbor John Buckhurst at La Trappe? Do you not know he is wanted by the police?”

“But we do not know why,” said Dr. Delmont, bending forward and pouring himself a glass of red wine. This he drank slowly, eating a bit of black bread with it.

“Monsieur Scarlett,” said Mademoiselle Elven, suddenly, “why does the government want John Buckhurst?”

“That, mademoiselle, is the affair of the government and of John Buckhurst,” I said.

“Pardon,” interrupted Delmont, heavily, “it is the affair of every honest man and woman—where a Bonaparte is concerned.”

“I do not understand you, doctor,” I said.

“Then I will put it brutally,” he replied. “We free people fear a family a prince of which is a common murderer.”

I did not answer; the world has long since judged the slayer of Victor Noir.

After a troubled silence the Countess asked me if I would not share their repast, and I thanked her and took some bread and grapes and a glass of red wine.

The sun had stolen into the corner where we had been sitting, and the Countess suggested that we move down to the lawn under the trees; so Dr. Delmont and Professor Tavernier lifted the table and bore it down the terrace steps, while I carried the chairs to the lawn.

It made me uncomfortable to play the rôle I was playing among these misguided but harmless people; that I showed it in my face is certain, for the Countess 38 looked up at me and said, smilingly: “You must not look at us so sorrowfully, Monsieur Scarlett. It is we who pity you.”

And I replied, “Madame, you are generous,” and took my place among them and ate and drank with them in silence, listening to the breeze in the elms.

Mademoiselle Elven, in her peasant’s dress, rested her pretty arm across her chair and sighed.

“It is all very well not to resist violence,” she said, “but it seems to me that the world is going to run over us some day. Is there any harm in stepping out of the way, Dr. Delmont?”

The Countess laughed outright.

“Not at all,” she said. “But we must not attempt to box the world’s ears as we run. Must we, doctor?”

Turning her lovely, sun-burned face to me, she continued: “Is it not charming here? The quiet is absolute. It is always still. We are absurdly contented here; we have no servants, you see, and we all plough and harrow and sow and reap—not many acres, because we need little. It is one kind of life, quite harmless and passionless, monsieur. I have been raking hay this morning. It is so strange that the Emperor should be troubled by the silence of these quiet fields—”

The distress in her eyes lasted only a moment; she turned and looked out across the green meadows, smiling to herself.

“At first when I came here from Paris,” she said, “I was at a loss to know what to do with all this land. I owe much happiness to Dr. Delmont, who suggested that the estate, except what we needed, might be loaned free to the people around us. It was an admirable thought; we have no longer any poor among us—”

She stopped short and gave me a quick glance. “Please understand me, Monsieur Scarlett. I make 39 no merit of giving what I cannot use. That would be absurd.”

“The world knows, madame, that you have given all you have,” I said.

“Then why is your miserable government sending her into exile?” broke in Monsieur Bazard, harshly.

“I will tell you,” I said, surprised at his tone and manner. “The colony at La Trappe is the head and centre of a party which abhors war, which refuses resistance, which aims, peacefully perhaps, at political and social annihilation. In time of peace this colony is not a menace; in time of war it is worse than a menace, monsieur.”

I turned to Dr. Delmont.

“With the German armies massing behind the forest borders yonder, it is unsafe for the government to leave you here at La Trappe, doctor. You are too neutral.”

“You mean that the government fears treason?” demanded the doctor, growing red.

“Yes,” I said, “if you insist.”

The Countess had turned to me in amazement.

“Treason!” she repeated, in an unsteady voice. “Is it treason for a small community to live quietly here in the Alsatian hills, harming nobody, asking nothing save freedom of thought? Is it treason for a woman of the world to renounce the world? Is it treason for her to live an unostentatious life and use her fortune to aid others to live? Treason! Monsieur, the word has an ugly ring to me. I am a soldier’s daughter!”

There was something touchingly illogical in the last words—this young apostle of peace naïvely displaying her credentials as though the mere word “soldier” covered everything.

“Your government insults us all,” said Bazard, between his teeth. 40

Mademoiselle Elven leaned forward, her blue eyes shining angrily.

“Because I have learned that the boundaries of nations are not the frontiers of human hearts, am I a traitor? Because I know no country but the world, no speech but the universal speech that one reads in a brother’s eyes, because I know no barriers, no boundaries, no limits to human brotherhood, am I a traitor?”

She made an exquisite gesture with half-open arms; all the poetry of the Théâtre Français was in it.

“Look at me! I had all that life could give, save freedom, and that I have now—freedom in thought, in speech, in action, freedom to love as friends love, freedom to love as lovers love. Ah, more! freedom from caste, from hate and envy and all suspicion, freedom to give, freedom to receive, freedom in life and in death! Am I a traitor? What do I betray? Shame on your Emperor!”

The young Countess, too, had risen in her earnestness and had laid one slender, sun-tanned hand upon the table.

“War?” she said. “What is this war to us? The Emperor? What is he to us? We who have set a watch on the world’s outer ramparts, guarding the white banner of universal brotherhood! What is this war to us!”

“Are you not a native of France?” I asked, bluntly.

“I am a native of the world, monsieur.”

“Do you mean to say that you care nothing for your own birthland?” I demanded, sharply.

“I love the world—all of it—every inch—and if France is part of the world, so is this Prussia that we are teaching our poor peasants to hate.”

“Madame,” said I, “the women of France to-day think differently. Our Creator did not make love of country a trite virtue, but a passion, and set it in 41 our bodies along with our other passions. If in you it is absent, that concerns pathology, not the police!”

I did not mean to wound her—I was intensely in earnest; I wanted her to show just a single glimmer of sympathy for her own country. It seemed as though I could not endure to look at such a woman and know that the primal passion, born with those who had at least wept for their natal Eden, was meaningless to her.

She had turned a trifle pale; now she sank back into her chair, looking at me with those troubled gray eyes in which Heaven itself had set truth and loyalty.

I said: “I do not believe that you care nothing for France. Train and curb and crush your own heart as you will, you cannot drive out that splendid earth-born humanity which is part of us—else we had all been born in heaven!”

“Come,” said Bazard, in a rage-choked voice, “let it end here, Monsieur Scarlett. If the government sends you here as a spy and an official, pray remember that you are not also sent as a missionary.”

My ears began to burn. “That is true,” I said, looking at the Countess, whose face had become expressionless. “I ask your pardon for what I have said and … for what I am about to do.”

There was a silence. Then, in a low voice, I placed them under formal arrest, one by one, touching each lightly on the shoulder as prescribed by the code. And when I came to the Countess, she rose, without embarrassment. I moved my lips and stretched out my arm, barely touching her. I heard Bazard draw a deep breath. She was my prisoner.

“I must ask you to prepare for a journey,” I said. “You have your own horses, of course?”

Without answering, Dr. Delmont walked away towards the stables; Professor Tavernier followed him, head bent. 42

“We shall want very little,” said the Countess, calmly, to Mademoiselle Elven. “Will you pack up what we need? And you, Monsieur Bazard, will you be good enough to go to Trois-Feuilles and hire old Brauer’s carriage?” Turning to me she said: “I must ask for a little delay; I have no longer a carriage of my own. We keep two horses to plough and draw grain; they can be harnessed to the farm-wagon for our effects.”

Monsieur Bazard’s hectic visage flushed, he gave me a crazy stare, and, for a moment, I fancied there was murder in his bright eyes. Doubtless, however, devotion to his creed of non-resistance conquered the impulse, and he walked quickly away across the meadows, his skeleton hands clinched under his loose sleeves.

Mademoiselle Elven also departed tip-tap! up the terrace in her coquettish wooden shoes, leaving me alone with the Countess under the trees.

“Madame,” said I, “before I affix the government seals to the doors of your house I must ask you to conduct me to the roof of the east wing.”

She bent her head in acquiescence; I followed her up the terrace into a stone hall where the dark Flemish pictures stared back at me and my spurred heels jingled in the silence. Up, up, and still up, winding around a Gothic spiral, then through a passage under the battlements and out across the slates, with wind and setting sun in my face and the sighing tree-tops far below.

Without glancing at me the Countess walked to the edge of the leads and looked down along the sheer declivity of the stone facade. Slender, exquisite, she stood there, a lonely shape against the sky, and I saw the sun glowing on her burnished red-gold hair, and her sun-burned hands, half unclosed, hanging at her side. 43

South, north, and west the mountains towered, purple as the bloom on October grapes; the white arm of the semaphore on the Pigeonnier was tinted with rose color; green velvet clothed the world, under a silver veil.

In the north a spark of white fire began to flicker on the crest of Mount Tonnerre. It was the mirror of a heliograph flashing out across leagues of gray-green hills to the rocky pulpit of the Pigeonnier.

I unslung my glasses and levelled them. The shining arm of the semaphore fell to a horizontal position and remained rigid; down came the signal flags, up went a red globe and two cones. Another string of flags blossomed along the bellying halliards; the white star flashed twice on Mount Tonnerre and went out.

Instantly I drew a flag from my pouch, tied it to the point of my sabre, and stepped out along the projecting snout of a gargoyle. Below, under my feet, the tree-tops rustled in the wind.

I had been flagging the Pigeonnier vigorously for ten minutes without result, when suddenly a dark dot appeared on the tower beneath the semaphore, then another. My glasses brought out two officers, one with a flag; and, still watching them through the binoculars, I signalled slowly, using my free hand: “This is La Trappe. Telegraph to Morsbronn that the inspector of Imperial Police requires a peloton of mounted gendarmes at once.”

Then I sat down on the sun-warmed slates and waited, amusing myself by watching the ever-changing display of signal flags on the distant observatory.

It may have been half a minute before I saw two officers advance to the railing of the tower and signal: “Attention, La Trappe!”

Pencil and pad on my knee, I managed to use my field-glasses and jot down the message: 44

“Peloton of mounted gendarmes goes to you as soon as possible. Repeat.”

I repeated, then raised my glasses. Another message came by flag: “Attention, La Trappe. Uhlans reported near the village of Trois-Feuilles; have you seen them?”

Prussian Uhlans! Here in the rear of our entire army! Nonsense! And I signalled a vigorous:

“No. Have you?”

To which came the disturbing reply: “Be on your guard. We are ordered to display the semaphore at danger. Report is credited at headquarters. Repeat.”

I repeated. Raising my glasses again, I could plainly see a young officer, an unlighted cigar between his teeth, jotting down our correspondence, while the other officer who had flagged me furled up his flags and laid them aside, yawning and stretching himself to his full height.

So distinctly did my powerful binoculars bring the station into range that I could even see the younger officer light a match, which the wind extinguished, light another, and presently blow a tiny cloud of smoke from his cigar.

The Countess de Vassart had come up to where I was standing on the gargoyle, balanced over the gulf below. Very cautiously I began to step backward, for there was not room to turn around.

“Would you care to look at the Pigeonnier, madame?” I asked, glancing at her over my shoulder.

“I beg you will be careful,” she said. “It is a useless risk to stand out there.”

I had never known the dread of great heights which many people feel, and I laughed and stepped backward, expecting to land on the parapet behind me. But the point of my scabbard struck against the battlements, 45 forcing me outward; I stumbled, staggered, and swayed a moment, striving desperately to recover my balance; I felt my gloved fingers slipping along the smooth face of the parapet, my knees gave way with horror; then my fingers clutched something—an arm—and I swung back, slap against the parapet, hanging to that arm with all my weight. A terrible effort and I planted my boots on the leads and looked up with sick eyes into the eyes of the Countess.

“Can you stand it?” I groaned, clutching her arm with my other hand.

“Yes—don’t be afraid,” she said, calmly. “Draw me toward you; I cannot draw you over.”

“Press your knees against the battlements,” I gasped.

She bent one knee and wedged it into a niche.

“Don’t be afraid; you are not hurting me,” she said, with a ghastly smile.

I raised one hand and caught her shoulder, then, drawn forward, I seized the parapet in both arms, and vaulted to the slate roof.

A fog seemed to blot my eyes; I shook from hair to heel and laid my head against the solid stone, while the blank, throbbing seconds past. The Countess stood there, shocked and breathless. I saw her sleeve in rags, and the snowy skin all bruised beneath.

I tried to thank her; we both were badly shaken, and I do not know that she even heard me. Her burnished hair had sagged to her white neck; she twisted it up with unsteady fingers and turned away. I followed slowly, back through the dim galleries, and presently she seemed to remember my presence and waited for me as I felt my way along the passage.

“Every little shadow is a yawning gulf,” I said. “My nerve is gone, madame. The banging of my own sabre scares me.” 46

I strove to speak lightly, but my voice trembled, and so did hers when she said: “High places always terrify me; something below seems to draw me. Did you ever have that dreadful impulse to sway forward into a precipice?”

There was a subtle change in her voice and manner, something almost friendly in her gray eyes as she looked curiously at me when we came into the half-light of an inner gallery.

What irony lurks in blind chance that I should owe this woman my life—this woman whose home I had come to confiscate, whose friends I had arrested, who herself was now my prisoner, destined to the shame of exile!

Perhaps she divined my thoughts—I do not know—but she turned her troubled eyes to the arched window, where a painted saint imbedded in golden glass knelt and beat his breast with two heavy stones.

“Madame,” I said, slowly, “your courage and your goodness to me have made my task a heavy one. Can I lighten it for you in any manner?”

She turned towards me, almost timidly. “Could I go to Morsbronn before—before I cross the frontier? I have a house there; there are a few things I would like to take—”

She stopped short, seeing, doubtless, the pain of refusal in my face. “But, after all, it does not matter. I suppose your orders are formal?”

“Yes, madame.”

“Then it is a matter of honor?”

“A soldier is always on his honor; a soldier’s daughter will understand that.”

“I understand,” she said.

After a moment she smiled and moved forward, saying:

“How the world tosses us—flinging strangers into 47 each other’s arms, parting brothers, leading enemies across each other’s paths! One has a glimpse of kindly eyes—and never meets them again. Often and often I have seen a good face in the lamp-lit street that I could call out to, ‘Be friends with me!’ Then it is gone—and I am gone—Oh, it is curiously sad, Monsieur Scarlett!”

“Does your creed teach you to care for everybody, madame?”

“Yes—I try to. Some attract me so strongly—some I pity so. I think that if people only knew that there was no such thing as a stranger in the world, the world might be a paradise in time.”

“It might be, some day, if all the world were as good as you, madame.”

“Oh, I am only a perplexed woman,” she said, laughing. “I do so long for the freedom of all the world, absolute individual liberty and no law but that best of all laws—the law of the unselfish.”

We had stopped, by a mutual impulse, at the head of the stone stairway.

“Why do you shelter such a man as John Buckhurst?” I asked, abruptly.

She raised her eyes to me with perfect composure.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I have come here from Paris to arrest him.”

She bent her head thoughtfully and laid the tips of her fingers on the sculptured balustrade.

“To me,” she said, “there’s no such thing as a political crime.”

“It is not for a political crime that we want John Buckhurst,” I said, watching her. “It is for a civil outrage.”

Her face was like marble; her hands tightened on the fretted carving. 48

“What crime is he charged with?” she asked, without moving.

“He is charged with being a common thief,” I said.

Now there was color enough in her face, and to spare, for the blood-stained neck and cheek, and even the bare shoulder under the torn crape burned pink.

“It is brutal to make such a charge!” she said. “It is shameful!—” her voice quivered. “It is not true! Monsieur, give me your word of honor that the government means what it says and nothing more!”

“Madame,” I said, “I give my word of honor that no political crime is charged against that man.”

“Will you pledge me your honor that if he answers satisfactorily to that false charge of theft, the government will let him go free?”

“I will take it upon myself to do so,” said I. “But what in Heaven’s name is this man to you, madame? He is a militant anarchist, whose creed is not yours, whose propaganda teaches merciless violence, whose programme is terror. He is well known in the faubourgs; Belleville is his, and in the Château Rouge he has pointed across the river to the rich quarters, calling it the promised land! Yet here, at La Trappe, where your creed is peace and non-resistance, he is welcomed and harbored, he is deferred to, he is made executive head of a free commune which he has turned into a despotism … for his own ends!”

She was gazing at me with dilated eyes, hands holding tight to the balustrade.

“Did you not know that?” I asked, astonished.

“No,” she said.

“You are not aware that John Buckhurst is the soul and centre of the Belleville Reds?”

“It is—it is false!” she stammered.

“No, madame, it is true. He wears a smug mask here; he has deceived you all.” 49

She stood there, breathing rapidly, her head high.

“John Buckhurst will answer for himself,” she said, steadily.

“When, madame?”

For answer she stepped across the hall and laid one hand against the blank stone wall. Then, reaching upward, she drew from between the ponderous blocks little strips of steel, colored like mortar, dropping them to the stone floor, where they rang out. When she had flung away the last one, she stepped back and set her frail shoulder to the wall; instantly a mass of stone swung silently on an unseen pivot, a yellow light streamed out, and there was a tiny chamber, illuminated by a lamp, and a man just rising from his chair.