Part 16

"Mademoiselle Hilda," said he. Hilda was sitting at the piano, but no tunes were flowing. She was behaving badly that evening and she knew it. She fumbled with the sheaves of music, and chucked Scotch under the chin, and doctored the candles. She was manifesting all the younger elements in her twenty-two years.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," insisted the Commandant. He was sentimental, and full of old-world courtesies, but he was used to being obeyed. Hilda became rapt in contemplating a candlestick.

"Mademoiselle Hilda, a little music, if you please," he said with a finality.

"You play," said Hilda to Scotch, sliding off the soap-box which served to uphold the artist to her instrument.

"Hilda, you make me tired," chided Scotch. "The Commandant has given you his orders."

"Oh, all right," said Hilda.

She played pleasantly with feeling and technique. More of her hidden life came to an utterance with her music than at other times. She led her notes gently to a close.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," said the Commandant from his seat in the shadows on the sofa, "parlez-vous français?"

This was his regular procedure. Why did he say it? They never could guess. He knew that the women, all three, understood French--Mrs. Bracher and Scotch speaking it fluently, Hilda, as became an American, haltingly. Did he not carry on most of his converse with them in French--always, when eloquent or sentimental? But unfailingly he used his formula, when he was highly pleased. They decided he must once have known some fair foreigner who could only faintly stammer in his native tongue, and that the habit of address had then become fixed upon him for moments of emotion.

He repeated his question.

"Oui," responded the girl. He kissed his fingers lightly to her, and waved the tribute in her direction, as if it could be wafted across the room.

"Chère artiste," said he, with a voice of conviction.

"And now the bacarolle," he pleaded.

"There are many bacarolles," she objected.

"I know, I know," he said, "and yet, after all, there is only one bacarolle."

"All right," she answered, obediently, and played on. The music died away, and the girl in her fought against the response that she knew was coming. She began turning over sheets of music on the rack. But the Commandant was not to be balked.

"Parlez-vous français?" he inquired, "vous, Mademoiselle Hilda."

"Oui, mon Commandant," she answered.

"Chère artiste," he said; "chère artiste."

"Ah, those two voices," he went on with a sigh; "they go with you, wherever you are. It is music, that night of love and joy. And here we sit--"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Mrs. Bracher, who did not care to have an evening of gaiety sag to melancholy; "how about a little César Franck?"

"Yes, surely," agreed the Commandant, cheerily; "our own composer, you know, though we never gave him his due."

Hilda ran through the opening of the D Minor.

"Now it is your turn," said she.

"My fingers are something stiff, with these cold nights by the window," replied the Commandant, "but certainly I will endeavor to play."

He seated himself at the instrument.

"Chère artiste," he murmured to the girl, who was retreating to the lounge.

The Commandant played well. He needed no notes, for he was stored with remembered bits. He often played to them of an evening, before he took his turn on watch. He played quietly along for a little. Out of the dark at their north window, there came the piping of a night bird. Birds were the only creatures seemingly untouched by the war. The fields were crowded thick with the bodies of faithful cavalry and artillery horses. Dogs and cats had wasted away in the seared area. Cattle had been mowed down by machine guns. Heavy sows and their tiny yelping litter, were shot as they trundled about, or, surviving the far-cast invisible death, were spitted for soldiers' rations. And with men, the church-yard and the fields, and even the running streams, were choked. Only birds of the air, of all the living, had remained free of their element, floating over the battling below them, as blithe as if men had not sown the lower spaces with slaughter.