"Why speak of it?" she said; "you know I will not go."
"I"ll stay, too," said Sir Thorald, eagerly; "Cecil and Molly can take the children to Paris; Madame de Morteyn, you really should go also."
She leaned back and shook her head decisively.
"Then you will both come, you and Madame de Morteyn?" urged Lady Hesketh of the vicomte.
The old man hesitated. His wife smiled. She knew he could not leave in the face of the enemy; she had been the wife of this old African campaigner for thirty years, and she knew what she knew.
"Helen--" he began.
"Yes, dear, we will both stay; the city is too hot in July," she said; "Sir Thorald, some coffee? No more? Betty, you want another m.u.f.fin?--they are there by Cecil. Children, I think I hear the carriages coming; you must not make Lady Hesketh wait."
"I have half a mind to stay," said Molly Hesketh. Sir Thorald said she might if she wanted to enlist, and they all tried to smile, but the sickly gray of early morning, sombre, threatening, fell on faces haggard with foreboding--young faces, too, lighted by the pale flames of the candles.
Alixe von Elster and Barbara Lisle went first; there were tears and embraces, and au revoirs and aufwiedersehens.
Little Alixe blanched and trembled when Sir Thorald bent over her, not entirely unconscious of the havoc his drooping mustache and cynical eyes had made in her credulous German bosom. Molly Hesketh kissed her, wishing that she could pinch her; and so they left, tearful, anxious, to be driven to Courtenay, and whirled from there across the Rhine to Cologne.
Sir Thorald and Lady Hesketh lingered on the terrace after the others had returned to the breakfast-room.
"Thorald," she said, "you are a brute!"
"Eh?" cried Sir Thorald.
"You"re a brute!"
"Molly, what the deuce is the matter?"
"Nothing--if you ever see her again, I"ll tell Ricky."
"I might say the same thing in regard to Ricky, my dear," said Sir Thorald, mildly.
"It is not true," she said; "I did no damage to him; and you know--you know down in the depths of your fickle soul that--that--"
"What, my dear?"
"Never mind!" said Molly, sharply; but she crimsoned when he kissed her, and held tightly to his sleeve.
"Good ged!" thought Sir Thorald; "what a devil I am with women!"
But now the carriages drove up--coupes, dog-carts, and a victoria.
"They say we ought not to miss this train," said Cecil, coming from the stables and flourishing a whip; "they say the line may be seized for government use exclusively in a few hours."
The old house-keeper, Madame Paillard, nodded and pointed to her son, the under-keeper.
"Francois says, Monsieur Page, that six trains loaded with troops pa.s.sed through Saint-Lys between midnight and dawn; dis, Francois, c"est le Sieur Bosz qui t"a renseigne--pas?"
"Oui, mamam!"
"Then hurry," said Lady Hesketh. "Thorald, call the others."
"I," said Cecil, "am going to drive Betty in the dog-cart."
"She"ll probably take the reins," said Sir Thorald, cynically.
Cecil brandished his whip and looked determined; but it was Betty who drove him to Saint-Lys station, after all.
The adieux were said, even more tearfully this time. Jack kissed his sister tenderly, and she wept a little on his shoulder--thinking of Rickerl.
One by one the vehicles rolled away down the gravel drive; and last of all came Molly Hesketh in the coupe with Jack Marche.
Molly was sad and a trifle distraite. Those periodical mental illuminations during which she discovered for the thousandth and odd time that she loved her husband usually left her fairly innocuous.
But she was a born flirt; the virus was bred in the bone, and after the first half-mile she opened her batteries--her eyes--as a matter of course on Jack.
What she got for her pains was a little sermon ending, "See here, Molly--three years ago you played the devil with me until I kissed you, and then you were furious and threatened to tell Sir Thorald. The truth is, you"re in love with him, and there is no more harm in you than there is in a china kitten."
"Jack!" she gasped.
"And," he resumed, "you live in Paris, and you see lots of things and you hear lots of things that you don"t hear and see in Lincolnshire. But you"re British, Molly, and you are domestic, although you hate the idea, and there will never be a desolated hearth in the Hesketh household as long as you speak your mother-tongue and read Anthony Trollope."
The rest of the road was traversed in silence. They rattled over the stones in the single street of Saint-Lys, rolled into the gravel oval behind the Gare, and drew up amid a hubbub of restless teams, market-wagons, and station-trucks.
"See the soldiers!" said Jack, lifting Lady Hesketh to the platform, where the others were already gathered in a circle. A train was just gliding out of the station, bound eastward, and from every window red caps projected and sunburned, boyish faces expanded into grins as they saw Lady Hesketh and her charges.
"Vive l"Angleterre!" they cried. "Vive Madame la Reine! Vive Johnbull et son rosbif!" the latter observation aimed at Sir Thorald.
Sir Thorald waved his eye-gla.s.s to them condescendingly; faster and faster moved the train; the red caps and fresh, tanned faces, the laughing eyes became a blur and then a streak; and far down the glistening track the faint cheers died away and were drowned in the roar of the wheels--little whirling wheels that were bearing them merrily to their graves at Wissembourg.
"Here comes our train," said Cecil. "Jack, my boy, you"ll probably see some fun; take care of your hide, old chap!" He didn"t mean to be patronizing, but he had Betty demurely leaning on his arm, and--dear me!--how could he help patronizing the other poor devils in the world who had not Betty, and who never could have Betty?
"Montez, madame, s"il vous plait!--Montez, messieurs!" cried the Chef de Gare; "last train for Paris until Wednesday! All aboard!"
and he slammed and locked the doors, while the engineer, leaning impatiently from his cab, looked back along the line of cars and blew his whistle warningly.
"Good-by, Dorrie!" cried Jack.
"Good-by, my darling Jack! Be careful; you will, won"t you?" But she was still thinking of Rickerl, bless her little heart!
Lady Hesketh waved him a demure adieu from the open window, relented, and gave his hand a hasty squeeze with her gloved fingers.
"Take care of Lorraine," she said, solemnly; then laughed at his telltale eyes, and leaned back on her husband"s shoulder, still laughing.
The cars were gliding more swiftly past the platform now; he caught a glimpse of Betty kissing her hand to him, of Cecil bestowing a gracious adieu, of Sir Thorald"s eye-gla.s.s--then they were gone; and far up the tracks the diminishing end of the last car dwindled to a dark square, a spot, a dot, and was ingulfed in a flurry of dust. As he turned away and pa.s.sed along the platform to the dog-cart, there came a roar, a shriek of a locomotive, a rush, and a train swept by towards the east, leaving a blear of scarlet in his eyes, and his ears ringing with the soldiers"
cheers: "Vive la France! Vive l"Empereur! a Berlin! a Berlin! a Berlin!" A furtive-eyed young peasant beside him shrugged his shoulders.
"Bismarck has called for the menu; his cannon are hungry," he sneered; "there goes the bill of fare."
"That"s very funny," said a fierce little man with a gray mustache, "but the bill of fare isn"t complete--the cla.s.s of "71 has just been called out!" and he pointed to a placard freshly pasted on the side of the station.