Part 9

And all this while the war went on, but seemed far from them, so seldom did any tidings of it pierce the seclusion in which they dwelt. By-and-by, as the autumn went on, they learned a little more. Fugitives coming to the smithy for a horse’s shoe; women fleeing to their old village homes from their base, gay life in the city; mandates from the government of defence sent to every hamlet in the country; stray news-sheets brought in by carriers or hawkers and hucksters--all these by degrees told them of the peril of their country, vaguely indeed, and seldom truthfully, but so that by mutilated rumours they came at last to know the awful facts of the fate of Sedan, the fall of the Empire, the siege of Paris. It did not alter their daily lives; it was still too far off and too impalpable. But a foreboding, a dread, an unspeakable woe settled down on them. Already their lands and cattle had been harassed to yield provision for the army and large towns; already their best horses had been taken for the siege-trains and the forage-waggons; already their ploughshares were perforce idle, and their children cried because of the scarcity of nourishment; already the iron of war had entered their souls.

The little street at evening was mournful and very silent; the few who talked spoke in whispers, lest a spy should hear them, and the young ones had no strength to play--they wanted food.

“It is as it was in my youth,” said Reine Allix, eating her piece of black bread and putting aside the better food prepared for her, that she might save it, unseen, for the “child.”

It was horrible to her and to all of them to live in that continual terror of an unknown foe, that perpetual expectation of some ghastly, shapeless misery. They were quiet,--so quiet!--but by all they heard they knew that any night, as they went to their beds, the thunder of cannon might awaken them; any morning, as they looked on their beloved fields, they knew that ere sunset the flames of war might have devoured them. They knew so little too; all they were told was so indefinite and garbled that sometimes they thought the whole was some horrid dream--thought so, at least, until they looked at their empty stables, their untilled land, their children who cried from hunger, their mothers who wept for the conscripts.

But as yet it was not so very much worse than it had been in times of bad harvest and of dire distress; and the storm which raged over the land had as yet spared this little green nest among the woods on the Seine.

November came. “It is a cold night, Bernadou; put on some more wood,” said Reine Allix. Fuel at the least was plentiful in that district, and Bernadou obeyed.

He sat at the table, working at a new churn for his wife; he had some skill at turnery and at invention in such matters. The child slept soundly in its cradle by the hearth, smiling while it dreamed. Margot spun at her wheel. Reine Allix sat by the fire, seldom lifting her head from her long knitting-needles, except to cast a look on her grandson or at the sleeping child. The little wooden shutter of the house was closed. Some winter roses bloomed in a pot beneath the little crucifix. Bernadou’s flute lay on a shelf; he had not had heart enough to play it since the news of the war had come.

Suddenly a great sobbing cry rose without--the cry of many voices, all raised in woe together. Bernadou rose, took his musket in his hand, undid his door, and looked out. All the people were turned out into the street, and the women, loudly lamenting, beat their breasts and strained their children to their bosoms. There was a sullen red light in the sky to the eastward, and on the wind a low, hollow roar stole to them.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The Prussians are on us!” answered twenty voices in one accord. “That red glare is the town burning.”

Then they were all still--a stillness that was more horrible than their lamentations.

Reine Allix came and stood by her grandson. “If we must die, let us die here,” she said, in a voice that was low and soft and grave.

He took her hand and kissed it. She was content with his answer.

Margot stole forth too, and crouched behind them, holding her child to her breast. “What can they do to us?” she asked, trembling, with the rich colours of her face blanched white.

Bernadou smiled on her. “I do not know, my dear. I think even they can hardly bring death upon women and children.”

“They can, and they will,” said a voice from the crowd.

None answered. The street was very quiet in the darkness. Far away in the east the red glare glowed. On the wind was still that faint, distant, ravening roar, like the roar of famished wolves; it was the roar of fire and of war.

In the silence Reine Allix spoke: “God is good. Shall we not trust in Him?”

With one great choking sob the people answered; their hearts were breaking. All night long they watched in the street--they who had done no more to bring this curse upon them than the flower-roots that slept beneath the snow. They dared not go to their beds; they knew not when the enemy might be upon them. They dared not flee; even in their own woods the foe might lurk for them. One man indeed did cry aloud, “Shall we stay here in our houses to be smoked out like bees from their hives? Let us fly!”

But the calm, firm voice of Reine Allix rebuked him: “Let who will, run like a hare from the hounds. For me and mine, we abide by our homestead.”

And they were ashamed to be outdone by a woman, and a woman of ninety years old, and no man spoke any more of flight. All the night long they watched in the cold and the wind, the children shivering beneath their mothers’ skirts, the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in the dark, starless sky. All night long they were left alone, though far off they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in the leafless woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their sleep, and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their folds in the outlying fields.

The daybreak came, gray, cheerless, very cold. A dense fog, white and raw, hung over the river; in the east, where the sun, they knew, was rising, they could only see the livid light of the still towering flames and pillars of black smoke against the leaden clouds.

“We will let them come and go in peace if they will,” murmured old Mathurin. “What can we do? We have no arms, no powder hardly, no soldiers, no defence.”

Bernadou said nothing, but he straightened his tall limbs, and in his grave blue eyes a light gleamed.

Reine Allix looked at him as she sat in the doorway of her house. “Thy hands are honest, thy heart pure, thy conscience clear. Be not afraid to die if need there be,” she said to him.

He looked down and smiled on her. Margot clung to him in a passion of weeping. He clasped her close and kissed her softly, but the woman who read his heart was the woman who had held him at his birth.

By degrees the women crept timidly back into their houses, hiding their eyes so that they should not see that horrid light against the sky, while the starving children clung to their breasts or to their skirts, wailing aloud in terror. The few men there were left, for the most part of them very old or else mere striplings, gathered together in a hurried council. Old Mathurin, the miller, and the patriots of the wine-shop were agreed that there should be no resistance, whatever might befall them; that it would be best to hide such weapons as they had and any provisions that still remained to them, and yield up themselves and their homes with humble grace to the dire foe. “If we do otherwise,” they said, “the soldiers will surely slay us, and what can a miserable little hamlet like this achieve against cannon and steel and fire?”

Bernadou alone raised his voice in opposition. His eye kindled, his cheek flushed, his words for once sprang from his lips like fire. “What!” he said to them, “shall we yield up our homes and our wives and our infants without a single blow? Shall we be so vile as to truckle to the enemies of France and show that we can fear them? It were a shame, a foul shame; we were not worthy of the name of men. Let us prove to them that there are people in France who are not afraid to die. Let us hold our own so long as we can. Our muskets are good, our walls strong, our woods in this weather morasses that will suck in and swallow them if only we have tact to drive them there. Let us do what we can. The camp of the francs-tireurs is but three leagues form us. They will be certain to come to our aid. At any rate, let us die bravely. We can do little, that may be; but if every man in France does that little that he can, that little will be great enough to drive the invaders off the soil.”