The Maids of Paradise. Chambers Robert William

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СКАЧАТЬ when men are at one another’s throats set me wriggling and twitching, and peering from the window, through which I could not see because of the blinds. Command after command was ringing out in the street below. “Forward!” shouted a resonant voice, and “Forward! forward! forward!” echoed the voices of the captains, distant and more distant, then drowned in the rolling of kettle-drums and the silvery clang of Moorish cymbals.

      The band music of the Algerian infantry died away in the distant tumult of the guns; faintly, at moments, I could still hear the shrill whistle of their flutes, the tinkle of the silver chimes on their toug; then a blank, filled with the hollow roar of battle, then a clear note from their reeds, a tinkle, an echoing chime – and nothing, save the immense monotone of the cannonade.

      I had been lying there motionless for an hour, my head on my hand, snivelling, when there came a knock at the door, and I hastily buttoned my blood-stained shirt to the throat, threw a tunic over my shoulders, and cried, “Come in!”

      A trick of memory and perhaps of physical weakness had driven from my mind all recollection of the Countess de Vassart since I had come to my senses under the surgeon’s probe. But at the touch of her fingers on the door outside, I knew her – I was certain that it could be nobody but my Countess, who had turned aside in her gentle pilgrimage to lift this Lazarus from the waysides of a hostile world.

      She entered noiselessly, bearing a bowl of broth and some bread; but when she saw me sitting there with eyes and nose all red and swollen from snivelling she set the bowl on a table and hurried to my side.

      “What is it? Is the pain so dreadful?” she whispered.

      “No – oh no. I’m only a fool, and quite hungry, madame.”

      She brought the broth and bread and a glass of the most exquisite wine I ever tasted – a wine that seemed to brighten the whole room with its liquid sunshine.

      “Do you know where you are?” she asked, gravely.

      “Oh yes – in Morsbronn.”

      “And in whose house, monsieur?”

      “I don’t know – ” I glanced instinctively at the tarnished coronet on the canopy above the bed. “Do you know, Madame la Comtesse?”

      “I ought to,” she said, faintly amused. “I was born in this room. It was to this house that I desired to come before – my exile.”

      Her eyes softened as they rested first on one familiar object, then on another.

      “The house has always been in our family,” she said. “It was once one of those fortified farms in the times when every hamlet was a petty kingdom – like the King of Yvetôt’s domain. Doubtless the ancient Trécourts also wore cotton night-caps for their coronets.”

      “I remember now,” said I, “a stone turret wedged in between two houses. Is this it?”

      “Yes, it is all that is left of the farm. My ancestors built this crazy old row of houses for their tenants.”

      After a silence I said, “I wish I could look out of the window.”

      She hesitated. “I don’t suppose it could harm you?”

      “It will harm me if I don’t,” said I.

      She went to the window and folded up the varnished blinds.

      “How dreadful the cannonade is growing,” she said. “Wait! don’t think of moving! I will push you close to the window, where you can see.”

      The tower in which my room was built projected from the rambling row of houses, so that my narrow window commanded a view of almost the entire length of the street. This street comprised all there was of Morsbronn; it lay between a double rank of houses constructed of plaster and beams, and surmounted by high-pointed gables and slated or tiled roofs, so fantastic that they resembled steeples.

      Down the street I could see the house that I had left twenty-four hours before, never dreaming what my journey to La Trappe held in store for me. One or two dismounted soldiers of the Third Hussars sat in the doorway, listening to the cannon; but, except for these listless troopers, a few nervous sparrows, and here and there a skulking peasant, slinking off with a load of household furniture on his back, the street was deserted.

      Everywhere shutters had been put up, blinds closed, curtains drawn. Not a shred of smoke curled from the chimneys of these deserted houses; the heavy gables cast sinister shadows over closed doors and gates barred and locked, and it made me think of an unseaworthy ship, prepared for a storm, so bare and battened down was this long, dreary commune, lying there in the August sun.

      Beside the window, close to my face, was a small, square loop-hole, doubtless once used for arquebus fire. It tired me to lean on the window, so I contented myself with lying back and turning my head, and I could see quite as well through the loop-hole as from the window.

      Lying there, watching the slow shadows crawling out over the sidewalk, I had been for some minutes thinking of my friend Mr. Buckhurst, when I heard the young Countess stirring in the room behind me.

      “You are not going to be a cripple?” she said, as I turned my head.

      “Oh no, indeed!” said I.

      “Nor die?” she added, seriously.

      “How could a man die with an angel straight from heaven to guard him! Pardon, I am only grateful, not impertinent.” I looked at her humbly, and she looked at me without the slightest expression. Oh, it was all very well for the Countess de Vassart to tuck up her skirts and rake hay, and live with a lot of half-crazy apostles, and throw her fortune to the proletariat and her reputation to the dogs. She could do it; she was Éline Cyprienne de Trécourt, Countess de Vassart; and if her relatives didn’t like her views, that was their affair; and if the Faubourg Saint-Germain emitted moans, that concerned the noble faubourg and not James Scarlett, a policeman attached to a division of paid mercenaries.

      Oh yes, it was all very well for the Countess de Vassart to play at democracy with her unbalanced friends, but it was also well for Americans to remember that she was French, and that this was France, and that in France a countess was a countess until she was buried in the family vault, whether she had chosen to live as a countess or as Doll Dairymaid.

      The young girl looked at me curiously, studying me with those exquisite gray eyes of hers. Pensive, distraite, she sat there, the delicate contour of her head outlined against the sunny window, which quivered with the slow boom! boom! of the cannonade.

      “Are you English, Monsieur Scarlett?” she asked, quietly.

      “American, madame.”

      “And yet you take service under an emperor.”

      “I have taken harder service than that.”

      “Of necessity?”

      “Yes, madame.”

      She was silent.

      “Would it amuse you to hear what I have been?” I said, smiling.

      “That is not the word,” she said, quietly. “To hear of hardship helps one to understand the world.”

      The cannonade had been growing so loud again that it was with difficulty that we could make ourselves audible to each other. The jar of the discharges СКАЧАТЬ