Chapter XVII The Skirt of War
“And there was mounting, in hot haste, the steed.
The mustering squadron and the clattering car
Went pouring forward with impetuous speed...”
BYRON.
It was a day of scurrying breezes and dappled skies. Long pools reflected blue and white in the ruts of his Majesty King Jerome of Westphalia’s neglected highway. Wide and deep ruts they were, tracks of the “Grand Army” that had been; and even a village child could have told that great guns and waggons had passed that way before the sweeping by of the last spring storm.
But the rider, on his big-boned, iron-grey horse, splashed through the mud at reckless speed. He had no thought for the story of the wounded country road. Its tragic significance would have left him unmoved had he understood. Such experience as he had just been through changes the whole world in a man’s eyes: he becomes as one who, a moment before in perfect health, finds himself shattered by some disabling accident—nothing in life can ever look, ever feel the same again. He had wrenched himself free of love’s snare as the wild thing of the woods from the teeth of the springe; but at what vital hurt, how maimed, how bruised, how deeply marked! What was it to him that the west wind, dashing against his face, was balmy with the breath of the black pinewoods on the rising slopes to his right; that the rank meadows that fell away to the left were colour alive, gold-green in the sunlight; that shadows swept across them like spirit messages? His ears were deaf to the organ chant of the pines, to the shrill call of the bird echoing back from the blue vault. Unmoved, he trotted through the poverty-stricken villages, by the deserted homesteads, once flourishing, beside the wasted cornfields. One whom life was treating as evilly as himself could not be expected to bestow even the alms of a pitying thought to the peasant soldiers, stiff in the snows of Russia, or plodding, vanquished at last, in Spanish rocky deserts, nor to the starving families to whom the breadwinner would never return. He did not even care whither he was hurrying, so long as he crossed the nearest frontier of a country to him accursed. To this goal all the passions of his mind were pointed.
With head bent towards the wind, and fiddle slung on his shoulder, a wandering musician was breasting the hill, where the high Imperial road skirting the Thuringian forest bends towards that fertile valley watered by the Fulda. The sinews of Steven’s steed faltered before the steepness of the ascent, and the mounted traveller, curbing his impatience to suit the way, found himself level with the humble wayfarer at a pace that made companionship inevitable. Yet, on the instant that he had recognized him, the rider would fain have passed unnoticed. It seemed hard, a perversity of fate, that in this wide, empty country, he should stumble upon the one man whom he would of all others avoid; the man who had had so much influence—he now thought for disaster—upon his life.
Geiger-Hans, the friend, the comrade, had become, in his eyes, the enemy. To his meddling he owed his present misfortune, the humiliation that was eating into his soul, the disillusion which made even the soft west wind bitter to his taste.
The wanderer started as he beheld the young face looking down at him from over the horseman’s cloak.
“You!” he exclaimed.
“I!” said Steven.
The man on foot halted. He on horseback unconsciously reined in. The two remained gazing at each other, and in the eyes of both was hot reproach.
Slowly the blood crept back crimson to the countenance of Geiger-Hans, which had grown livid under its tan.
“And whither set you off alone, bridegroom, on your grey horse?” asked he at length, in that tone of irony under which he hid most of emotions.
“Anywhere,” answered the bridegroom with a pale smile, “so long as I put space between myself and my bride.”
Geiger-Hans drew his brows together into a dark frown. His nostrils dilated, the corners of his mouth twitched.
“Peste!” said he under his voice. Then: “Is it not a little premature? The joy bells can hardly be silent yet. Had it been a few months later—but now!”
His tone was cynical, but his eye was stern and anxious.
“Months?” echoed the rider with a laugh. “It took her but the measure of minutes to decide on my worth.”
“Her?” commented the musician with inquiring emphasis.
“Did you think,” answered Steven—and, though he strove to be cool, the passion of his wrath wrote itself on every line of his face and vibrated in his voice like the first mutterings of thunder—“did you think I went through the marriage ceremony for the pure amusement of making a nine days’ scandal and deserting my hour-old wife? That would have been a brilliant jest indeed! No; if you must know, the situation is of her making. She took her woman’s privilege... and changed her mind.”
“She was a child yesterday,” said Geiger-Hans.
There was pain in Steven’s smile as he returned:
“She was no child this morning.”
“But, heavens!” cried the other impatiently, “even so. Did she play the woman, was it not the more reason for you to play the man? You left her, you left her... is it possible? For a few sharp words, perhaps, some silly misunderstanding! Why, she was yours, man; and you should have carried her with you, were it on the crupper of that high-boned grey.”
“Aye,” replied Steven. “Even so, as you say. It also dawned upon me, deficient as I am in wits, that the time had come for me to play the man. I actually announced my intention of carrying her away with me by main force—not on this brute, but in the coach prepared for our bridal journey. She reminded me that I took her fortune with her.”
“Ah, bah!” said the fiddler, and winced as if he had been struck.
“It seems she is an heiress,” continued the bridegroom’s voice over his head. “She offered me half her fortune—her whole fortune—if I would go without her! Hey! what answer would you have a man make to that?”
It seemed as if the fiddler could not say; even his ready tongue had no reply.
Steven had meant to take a more dignified attitude with the vagrant; to assume as gentlemanly a mask of indifference as possible. The unexpected meeting (and Steven had no intention but that it should be the last) should be conducted with a rational regard to the distance between them. His heart was no longer on his sleeve for this wayside jackdaw to peck at. But the old power of the fellow’s presence, and also his own youthful pain, were too strong for him. Into the silence he dropped a desperate cry:
“Oh, curse you, Geiger-Hans; why could you not have passed me by on the road that evening, and left me to my own life!”
The fiddler looked up at him, still mute; but there was something in his look that went straight to the core of Steven’s wounded soul, and brought a sense of comfort and of strength. And yet—strange! it actually seemed as if Steven’s sorrow were nothing to the sorrow of Geiger-Hans, this hour. They were enemies no more—they were comrades, struck by the same misfortune. But Geiger-Hans was brave; he knew how to bear his share. Steven felt suddenly ashamed.
“And so you rode away?” said the musician then, laying his hand on the horse’s shoulder.
It was to Steven as if that lean hand had kindly touched himself.
“Aye—I got the first nag to be had for money, and rode away, leaving her my carriage and horses and servants. For a Countess Waldorff-Kielmansegg must have her equipage! That episode is closed!”
The rider chucked his reins and set the rested horse to his labour up the hill once more.
Geiger-Hans had remained a second, gazing at the stones in the road; then he roused himself, and caught up the rider in a couple of quick strides. His shoulders were rounded as beneath a burden. Yet Fate had played him too many scurvy tricks for him to indulge in the astounded rebellion of youth. After a while he looked up and spoke again.
“These women,” he said, “these children—they insult a man because they do not understand. Mischief has been made—mischief is always alert somewhere when marriage-bells are ringing. Go back to her!”
“I!” cried Steven Lee.
“Go back to her!” said the fiddler again, as he trudged the stony way. “Be generous——”
Steven laughed out loud; and Geiger-Hans knew that the wound had gone deeper even than he suspected.
“I am for Vienna,” said the bridegroom briefly. “But I shall make fit settlements upon her, never fear, and such provisions as may safeguard her honour... and my own. And as——”
“Nay, comrade,” interrupted the other, sharply, “such a union as yours—why, ’twould be the easiest contract to annul that ever two young fools repented of.”
Steven’s hands contracted over the leather.
“Do you think so?” said he, and grew darkly crimson. “Oh, of course,” he said, and laughed, “that would be much the best. Aha! Annul! Well, she has only to wish it.”
The musician, observing him, showed now a lighter countenance, and presently smiled to himself. Then he shifted his instrument from his back to his breast and began to twang the strings, as if in deep reflection.
“We shall part at the top of the hill,” said the rider.
“Shall we?” said the wayfarer. “I think not. Listen, my lord.”
The rousing autumn wind brought indeed a strange distant rumour on its wings, and the fiddler imposed silence on his restless fingers and stood still himself, leaning his ear.
Once more Steven arrested his horse. There is nothing so infectious as the curiosity of the ear. The flapping gust fell as they halted; and then the sounds which it had carried over the crest of the knoll seemed to be repeated with much greater distinctness from the vale in their rear.
“What is it?” asked he.
It was a sound like the beat of giant storm-rain upon forest leaves, only that it was measured at repeated intervals by rhythmic jingle and clink. Even as he spoke, Steven heard a crisp drumming of hoofs separate itself from the confusion; then, upon the ring of a commanding voice, the thunder-wave of advance broke itself into silence. And in the midst of this silence a succession of cracking shots suddenly pattered close on one another, as beads dropping from a string.
“Stand back!” cried the fiddler. And, suiting the action to the word, he seized the horse by the bit and forced it backwards into the ditch that girt the road on the side of the fields.
“But what is it?” asked Steven once more, as clamour within the woods rose again: a hideous medley of human voices wrangling like angry beasts, of plunging and neighing of horses, crackling of boughs and thud of iron hoofs. The fiddler dilated his nostrils. He stood leaning against the flank of the grey, his right hand still firmly on the bit. A fine blue vapour, pungent of smell, was oozing between the dark firs.
“Have you never smelt it before, you innocent?” said he, looking up at the rider, and his sunburnt face was kindled by stern fires. “Yet there’s scarce a square rood of Europe, these twelve years, that has not known the smoke of this holocaust. It is war, man!”
The words were still on his lips when the placid front of the forest before them was shaken and pierced and rent in a hundred places. Red-coated hussars, with flying blue dolmans—bareheaded most, but some with huge shako and plume at a dishevelled angle—broke covert along the whole line, crashing through the underwood, leaping, it seemed, one upon the other, each man inclining in his saddle and spurring towards the downward slope at a mad gallop.
Steven’s horse shivered under him. It had, no doubt, in its youth been a charger: it was now seized with martial ardour, and flinging up its head to shake off the fiddler’s grip, displayed such a strong intention to join in the race—which no doubt it conceived to be a glorious charge—that a less practised rider would have found it hard to keep the saddle.
As it was, Steven could gather but a confused impression of the flying troop as it thundered past—of a whirl, bucketing, straining, pumping, clanking, splashing; of men’s faces, crimson, distorted, open-mouthed; of bridles slavered with blood and foam; of craning horses’ necks, and nostrils afire!
Geiger-Hans gave a shrill laugh:
“The most gallant the Hussars of the Guard of His Majesty Jerome the First (and last!) in full rout! And, oh, shadow of Moscow! who are the pursuers?”