"Go on and play!" he whispered with a terrible effort.
"But you----"
"The Brabanconne! Quick!"
She went, whimpering. Standing before the keyboard she pulled on her wooden gloves and struck the keys.
Out over the infernal uproar below pealed the bells; the morning sky rang with the n.o.ble summons to all brave men. Once more the ancient tower trembled with the mighty out-crash of the battle hymn.
With the last note she turned and looked down at him where he lay against the wall. He opened his glazing eyes and tried to smile at her.
"Bully," he whispered. "Could you recite--the words--to me--just so I could hear them on my way--West?"
She left the keyboard, came and dropped on her knees beside him; and closing her eyes to check the tears sang in a low, tremulous, girlish voice, De Lonlay"s words, to the battle anthem of revolution.
"Bully," he sighed. And spoke no more on earth.
But the little mistress of the bells did not know his soul had pa.s.sed.
And the French officer who came leaping up the stairs, pistol lifted, halted in astonishment to see a dead man lying beside a sack of bombs and a young girl on her knees beside him, weeping and tremblingly intoning "La Brabanconne."
CHAPTER XXI
THE GARDENER
A week later, toward noon, as usual, the two American, muleteers, Smith and Glenn, sauntered over from their corral to the White Doe Tavern where, it being a meatless day, they ate largely of potato soup and of a tench, smoking hot.
The tench had been caught that morning off the back doorstep, which was an ancient and mossy slab of limestone let into the coping of the river wall.
Jean Courtray, the crippled inn-keeper, caught it. All that morning he had sat there in the sun on the river wall, half dozing, opening his dim eyes at intervals to gaze at his painted quill afloat among the water weeds of the little river Lesse. At intervals, too, he turned his head with that peculiar movement of the old, and peered at his daughter, Maryette, and the Belgian gardener who were working among the potatoes in the garden.
And at last he had hooked his fish and the emaciated young Belgian dropped his hoe and came over and released it from the hook where it lay flopping and quivering and glittering among the wild gra.s.ses on the river bank. And that was how Kid Glenn and Sticky Smith, American muleteers on duty at Saint Lesse, came to lunch on freshly caught tench at the Inn of the White Doe.
After luncheon, agreeably satiated, they rose from the table in the little dining room and strolled out to the garden in the rear of the inn, their Mexican spurs clanking. Maryette heard them; they tipped their caps to her; she acknowledged their salute gravely and continued to cultivate her garden with a hoe, the blond, consumptive Belgian trundling a rickety cultivator at her heels.
"Look, Stick," drawled Glenn. "Maryette"s got her decoration on."
From where they lounged by the river wall they could see the cross of the Legion pinned to the girl"s blouse.
Both muleteers had been present at the investment the day before, when a general officer arrived from Paris and the entire garrison of Sainte Lesse had been paraded--an impressive total of three dozen men--six gendarmes and a brigadier; one remount sub-lieutenant and twenty troopers; a veterinary, two white American muleteers, and five American negro hostlers from Baton Rouge.
The girl had nearly died of shyness during the ceremony, had endured the accolade with crimson cheeks, had stammered a whispered response to the congratulations of neighbors who had gathered to see the little bell-mistress of Sainte Lesse honoured by the country which she had served in the belfry of Nivelle.
As she came past Smith and Glenn, trailing her hoe, the latter now sufficiently proficient in French, said gaily:
"Have you heard from Jack again, Mamzelle Maryette?"
The girl blushed:
"I hear from Djack by every mail," she said, with all the transparent honesty that characterized her.
Smith grinned:
"Just like that! Well, tell him from me to quit fooling away his time in a hospital and come and get you or somebody is going to steal you."
The girl was very happy; she stood there in the September sunshine leaning on her hoe and gazing half shyly, half humorously down the river where a string of American mules was being watered.
Mellow Ethiopian laughter sounded from the distance as the Baton Rouge negroes exchanged pleasantries in limited French with a couple of gendarmes on the bank above them. And there, in the sunshine of the little garden by the river, war and death seemed very far away. Only at intervals the veering breeze brought to Sainte Lesse the immense vibration of the cannonade; only at intervals the high sky-clatter of an airplane reminded the village that the front was only a little north of Nivelle, and that what had been Nivelle was not so very far away.
"If you were _my_ girl, Maryette," remarked Smith, "I"d die of worry in that hospital."
"_You_ might have reason to, Monsieur," retorted the girl demurely. "But you see it"s Djack who is convalescing, not you."
She had become accustomed to the ceaseless banter of Burley"s two comrades--a banter entirely American, and which at first she was unable to understand. But now all things American, including accent and odd, perverted humour, had become very dear to her. The clink-clank of the muleteer"s big spurs always set her heart beating; the sight of an arriving convoy from the Channel port thrilled her, and to her the trample of mules, the shouts of foreign negroes, the drawling, broken French spoken by the white muleteers made heavenly real to her the dream which love had so suddenly invaded, and into which, as suddenly, strode Death, clutching at Love.
She had beaten him off--she had--or G.o.d had--routed Death, driven him from the dream. For it was a dream to her still, and she thought she could never be able to comprehend the magic reality of it, even when at last her man, "Djack," came back to prove the blessed miracle which held her in the magic of its thrall.
"Who"s the guy with the wheelbarrow?" inquired Sticky Smith, rolling a cigarette.
"Karl, his name is," she answered; "--a Belgian refugee."
"He looks like a Hun to me," remarked Glenn, bluntly.
"He has his papers," said the girl.
Glenn shrugged.
"With his little pink eyes of a pig and his whitish hair and eyebrows--well, maybe they make "em like that in Belgium."
"Papers," added Smith, "_can_ be swiped."
The girl shook her head:
"He"s an invalid student from Ypres. He looks quite ill, I think."
"He looks the lunger, all right. But Huns have it, too. What does he do--wander about town at will?"