CHAPTER XXXVI
As Warner returned to his own room, two thoughts persisted and dominated all others: Philippa's parents were known to Wildresse; Wildresse must be found.
Somehow or other he had already taken it for granted that Philippa's father or mother, or perhaps both parents, had been engaged in some capacity in the service of this family called De Châtillon. There was no particular reason for him to believe this; her parents might have been the friends of these people. But the idea of some business association between the two families seemed to obsess him – he could not explain why – and with this idea filling his mind he entered his room, seated himself by the open window, and picked up the packages of personal papers belonging to Wildresse and taken from his safe by Asticot.
There were three packets of documents, each packet tied separately with pink tape and sealed twice.
Running over the first packet like a pack of cards, he found that every paper had been endorsed on the outside and dated, although the dates were not arranged in proper sequence.
On the first document which he read without unsealing the packet was written, "Affaire Schnaeble, 1887." On the next he read, when he parted the papers, "Affaire de Clermont-Ferrand, 1888." The next, however, bore the inscription, "Affaire Panitza" and bore an earlier date. Beneath this caption was written: "Prince Ferdinand and the Oberanovitch Dynasty. Dossier of Draga. The Jockey Club and King Milan. Queen Natalie and her dossier. The Grand Duke Cyril."
He turned over document after document, all bearing endorsements, but the majority of the captions meant nothing to him, such as "Abdul Hamid and Marmora," "The Greco-Italian Proposition for an International Gendarmerie," "Ali Pasha, Saïd Pasha, and the Archives of Tenedos," "The Hohenzollern-Benedetti Affair."
There seemed to be nothing in this packet to justify his breaking the seals before he turned over the documents to the military authorities.
Nor, in the next packet, could he discover anything among the motley assortment of endorsements which seemed to justify his forestalling the French authorities in their examination.
But in the third packet he found that, no matter what the endorsement might be, under each caption was written, "The De Châtillon Affair."
This packet he locked in his desk until he should return; he gathered up the other two, took his cap, buttoned and belted his Norfolk, and went downstairs.
The man he sought had not yet left the Château; General Delisle was seated at a table in the music room looking at a series of big linen maps which had been hung up on the opposite wall.
A dozen officers were seated in a semicircle around him; an officer with a pointer stood by the maps as demonstrator, another sat at a table near by, under a portable switchboard. In the little room adjoining was seated a military telegraph operator.
Through the open French windows cyclist messengers were constantly mounting and descending the terrace steps; every few moments motor cycles arrived and departed; now and then a cavalryman galloped up in an old-style storm of dust, or a trooper vaulted into his saddle and departed ventre à terre. The growling of the cannonade was perfectly audible in the room.
At first General Delisle did not see Warner, but the Russian Military Observer did, and he rose and came quietly over to shake hands and inquire concerning the health of the ladies.
Several times his big, fish-blue eyes wandered curiously all over Warner's face and figure, as though insolently appraising the American and trying to come to some conclusion concerning the nature of the man and of the packet of papers which he had stuffed into the pocket of his Norfolk jacket.
A moment later Delisle caught sight of him, rose with pleasant courtesy, and extended his hand, asking after the health of the ladies, and making a similar inquiry concerning himself.
"General, could I see you for one moment alone?" said Warner.
The General moved out from the seated circle of officers, joined Warner, and moved with unhurried step beside him through the house toward the billiard room.
When they had reached the billiard room, Warner had told him all he knew concerning Wildresse, concluding with the appearance of the man escorted by Uhlans on Vineyard Hill.
Then he drew the papers from his pocket and gave them to the silent officer, who stood quite motionless, looking him through and through.
It was evident that General Delisle had no hesitation about breaking the big, sprawling seals of grey wax; he ripped both packets open so that the documents fell all over the scarf covering the billiard table; then, rapidly, he picked up, opened, scanned, and cast aside paper after paper.
There was not the slightest change in the expression of his face when he came to the "Schnaeble-Incident"; he scanned it, laid it aside, and said quietly as he picked up the next paper:
"That document is sufficient to settle the affair of this man Wildresse. If we catch him, ceremony will be superfluous… The nearest wall or tree, you understand – unless he cares to make a statement first… I always have time to listen to statements. Only one out of a hundred proves to be of any value at all, Mr. Warner, but that one is worth all the time I waste on the others – "
And all the while he was opening, scanning, and casting aside document after document.
"Oh, almost any one of these is enough," remarked the General. "Here's a villainous center of ramifications, leading God knows where – "
He checked himself abruptly; a dull color mounted to his bronzed cheekbones. Warner glanced at the caption of the document. It read: "Dossier of Count Cassilis and the Battenberg Affair."
The General read it, very slowly, for a few minutes. He could not have gone much further than the first paragraph when he folded the paper abruptly, shot a lightning glance at Warner that dazzled him like a saber flash; and suddenly smiled.
"This seems to indicate a rather bad business, Mr. Warner," he said pleasantly. "I count on your discretion, of course."
"You may, General."
"I mean even among my entourage. Do you understand?"
"Perfectly."
"Who has any knowledge of these papers excepting yourself and myself?"
"Nobody but Wildresse, as far as I know."
The General motioned to the sentry who stood guard by the three sky-guns on the north terrace:
"Colonel Gerould; say to him I am waiting!"
A few moments later the big Colonel of Cuirassiers came clanking into the billiard room. General Delisle handed him the papers, said a few words in a low voice. As he spoke there was something quietly terrible in the stare he turned on Colonel Gerould; and the latter turned visibly white and glared blankly into space as the General laid his hand on his arm and spoke low and rapidly into his ear.
The next moment the Cuirassier was gone and General Delisle had taken Warner's arm with a quiet smile and was leisurely sauntering back toward the music room.
"It was very friendly of you, Mr. Warner – may I add, very sagacious? But that is like an American. We French feel very keenly the subtle sympathy of – " he laughed – "neutral America."
"Are these papers of real importance, General? – Is it proper of me to ask you such a question?"
"They are of – overwhelmingly vital importance, Mr. Warner."
"What!"
The General halted, looked him pleasantly in the eyes:
"The most vitally important information that I have ever received during my entire military career," he said quietly. "Judge, then, of my gratitude to you. I cannot express it. I can only offer you my hand – with a heart – very full."
They exchanged a firm clasp. As they went into the music room, Count Cassilis, who had seated himself at the piano, and who was running over a few minor scales, turned and looked at them, rising slowly to his feet with the other officers when the General entered. He had his monocle screwed into his right eye.
The cannonade had now become noisy and jarring enough to interrupt conversation, and it was plain to Warner that French batteries somewhere along the Récollette had opened.
Out on the terrace he could see aëroplanes in the northeastern sky, no doubt trying to find the range for the French batteries. They were very high, and the clots of white appeared and dissolved far below them.
But now the steady tattoo of machine guns had become audible in the direction of the Ausone Forest, and the racket swelled swiftly into a roar of rifle fire and artillery – so rapidly, indeed, that every head in the vicinity was turned to listen – hussars, cyclists, infantry, the cannoniers lying beside their sky-guns, the military chauffeurs, the sentries, all looked toward the northeast.
Two more French aëroplanes took the air over the plateau, rose rapidly, and headed toward the Ausone Forest.
Down on the Saïs highway the slowly moving file of motor lorries drew out to the right-hand edge of the road, and past them galloped battery after battery, through a whirling curtain of dust – guns, caissons, mounted officers, flashing past in an interminable stream, burying the baggage vans out of sight under the billowing clouds. Columns of cavalry, also, appeared in the river meadows on both banks, trotting out across the stubble and splashing through the reeds, all moving toward the northeast.
The quarry road, too, was black with moving infantry; another column tramped across the uplands beyond; horsemen were riding over Vineyard Hill, horsemen crossed the Récollette by every ford, every pontoon – everywhere the French riders were to be seen swarming over the landscape, appearing, disappearing, in view again increased in numbers, until there seemed to be no end to their coming.
The uproar of the fusillade grew deafening; the sharper crack of the fieldpieces became dulled in the solid shocks from heavier calibers.
General Delisle came out on the terrace and stood looking across the valley just as the British biplane soared up over the trees – the Bristol machine, pointed high, racing toward the northeast.
Warner, looking up, realized that Halkett was up there. The roaring racket of the aëroplane swept the echoes along forest and hillside; higher, higher it pointed; smoke signals began to drop from it and unroll against the sky.
Looking upward, Warner felt a light touch on his elbow; Sister Eila had slipped her arm through his.
Gazing into the sky under her white coiffe, the Sister of Charity stood silent, intent, her gaze concentrated on the receding aëroplane.
When the first snowy puff ball appeared below it, her arm closed convulsively on Warner's, and remained so, rigid, while ball after ball of fleece spotted the sky, spread a little, hung, and slowly dissolved against the blue.
Down on the Saïs road four Red Cross motor ambulances were speeding in the wake of the artillery. A fifth ambulance came up the drive. Sister Félicité, seated beside the chauffeur, signaled to Sister Eila.
Warner said:
"Are you called for field duty?"
"On the telephone a few minutes ago. They need us this side of Ausone."
He went with her to the ambulance and she swung on board. As the chauffeur started to back and make a demi-tour, Warner jumped on the vehicle and shook hands with Dr. Senlis.
"Do you want a bearer?" he asked.
"Yes, if you don't mind."
Sister Eila picked up a brassard bearing the conventional emblem, and tied it around his left arm above the elbow.
He had not yet noticed the other figure in the ambulance; now he looked around, stared, and suddenly a violent desire to laugh seized him.
"Asticot!" he exclaimed.
"Oui, c'est moi, M'sieu'," replied that smirking gentleman, with a demureness that struck Warner as horrible.
"But why?" he asked, in frank amazement.
"Ah," rejoined Asticot complacently, "that is the question, M'sieu'. I myself do not know exactly why I am here."
But he knew well enough. First of all, he had gotten all over any terror of bullets in Africa. Five years and fifty skirmishes had blunted that sort of fear in him.
What he wanted to do was to see what was going on. More than that, the encounter with One Eye in Ausone had strangely moved this rat of the Faubourgs. He desired to find that Disciplinary Battalion again – the Battalion which had been for him a hell on earth – but he wanted to look at it, pushed by a morbid curiosity. If One Eye were there, perhaps other old friends might still decorate those fierce and sullen ranks.
There was a certain lieutenant, too – gladly he would shoot him in the back if opportunity offered. He had dreamed for months of doing this.
But there was still another reason that incited Asticot to offer his services to Sister Félicité as a bearer. The ambulance had been called to the Ausone Forest. Somewhere within those leafy shades lurked Wildresse.
Never before had such a hatred blazed in the crippled intellect of Asticot as the red rage that flared within him when he learned that he had been employed by a spy who had sold out France.
Anything else he could have understood, any other crime. He was not squeamish; nothing appalled him in the category of villainy except only this one thing. Scoundrel as he was, he could not have found it in his heart to sell his country. And to remember that he had been employed by a man who did sell France aroused within him a passion for revenge so fierce that only a grip on the throat of Wildresse could ever satisfy the craving that made his vision red as blood.
He wore a brassard, this voyou of the Paris gutters, set with the Geneva cross. And in his pocket was an automatic pistol.
From the rear seat Sister Eila could still see the Bristol biplane in the sky, circling now high over Ausone Forest and the cultivated hills beyond. She never removed her eyes from it as the ambulance rolled on through the dust beside the slower moving line of lorries.
Later the motor lorries turned east; a column of infantry replaced them, trudging silently along in the sun, their rifles shouldered. Then they passed a battalion of chasseurs-à-pied in green and blue, swinging along at a cheerful, lively pace toward the crash of rifles and machine guns.
Across the river they saw the first German shells explode in the fields, and dark columns of smoke rise and spread out over the bushes and standing grain.
For some time, now, Warner had recognized the high whimper of bullets, but he said nothing until Sister Eila mentioned the noises, guessing correctly what were the causes.
Asticot shrugged and cuddled a cigarette which Warner had given him, enjoying it with leering deliberation.
He was inclined to become loquacious, too, whenever a shell exploded across the river.
"Baoum – baoum!" he sneered. "Tiens! Another overripe egg! The Bosches will starve themselves with their generosity! Pan! Pouf! V'lan! Zoum – zo – um! That is shrapnel, M'sieu', as you know. As for me, I do not care for it. Anything else on the carte du jour, but not shrapnel for Bibi! No! For the big shells, yes; for the machine guns, yes; for the Démoiselles Lebel, all right! But no shrapnel, if you please – "
Sister Eila looked at him in smiling surprise.
"You would do well in the wards, with your cheerfulness," she said. "I always was certain that I should find in you some quality to admire."
Asticot looked at her, mouth open, as though thunderstruck. Then, to Sister Eila's amazement, a blush turned his expressive features scarlet.
To be spoken to like that by a Sainte of Saint Vincent de Paul! To be admired by a Sister of Charity! He, Asticot, was commended, approved of, encouraged!
It was too much for Asticot. He turned redder and redder; he started to relieve his terrible embarrassment by cursing, caught himself in time, choked, passed his red bandanna over his battered visage, tried to whistle, failed, and turned his ratty and distressed eyes upon Warner for relief.
"Cheerfulness is a virtue," said Warner gravely. "You seem to possess others, also; you have physical courage, you have exhibited gratitude toward me which I scarcely expected. It is a wonderful thing for a man, Asticot, to be commended at all by Sister Eila."
Sister Eila smiled and flushed; then her face became serious and she leaned forward and looked up at the Bristol biplane. Under it the white fleece of the shrapnel was still floating.
The ambulance stopped; hussars came riding on either side of it; an officer gave an order to the driver, who turned out among some trees.
The road ahead was crowded with infantry deploying at a double – a strange, gaunt, haggard regiment, white with dust, swinging out to whistle signal into the patches of woodland and across the willow-set meadows to the right.
Sullen sweating faces looked up everywhere among the bayonets; hard eyes, thin lips, bullet heads, appeared through the drifting dust.
Here and there an officer spoke, and there seemed to be a ringing undertone of iron in the blunt commands.
They came running in out of the stifling cloud of dust like a herd of sulky vicious bulls goaded right and left by the penetrating whistle calls and the menacing orders of their officers.
"One Eye!" yelled Asticot, waving his cap vigorously. "He! Mon vieux! How are you, old camp kettle?"
A soldier looked up with a frightful leer, waved his arm, and ran forward.
"C'est un vieux copain à moi!" remarked Asticot proudly. "M'sieu', voilà le Battalion d'Afrique! Voilà Biribi qui passe! Tonnerre de Dieu! There is Jacques! Hé! Look yonder, M'sieu'! That young one with the head of a Lyceum lad! Over there! That is the gosseof Wildresse!"
"What!"
"Certainly! That is Jacques Wildresse of Biribi! Hé! If he knew! Eh? Poor devil! If he knew what we know! And his scoundrel of a father out there now in those woods! C'est épatant! Quoi! B'en, such things are true, it seems! And when he looses his rifle, that lad, what if the lead finds a billet in his own flesh and blood! Eh? Are such things done by God in these days?"
An officer rode up and said to the chauffeur:
"Pull out of there. Back out to the road!"
But, once on the road again, they were ordered into a pasture, then ordered forward again and told to take station under a high bank crowned with bushes.
No shells came over, but bullets did in whining streams. The air overhead was full of them, and the earth kept sliding from the bank where the lead hit it with a slapping and sometimes a snapping sound, like the incessant crack of a coach whip.
Firing had already begun in the woods whither the Battalion of Africa had hurried with their flapping equipments and baggy uniforms white with dust. In the increasing roar of rifle fire the monotonous woodpecker tapping of the machine guns was perfectly recognizable.
Branches, twigs, bits of bark, green leaves, came winnowing earthward in a continual shower. There was nothing to be seen anywhere except a few mounted hussars walking their horses up and down the road, and the motor cyclists who passed like skimming comets toward Ausone.
Sister Eila and Sister Félicité had descended to the road and seated themselves on the grassy bank, where they conversed in low tones and looked calmly into the woods.
Asticot, possessed of a whole pack of cigarettes, promenaded his good fortune and swaggered up and down the road, ostentatiously coming to salute when an automobile full of officers came screaming by.
The military chauffeur dozed over his steering wheel. Two white butterflies fluttered persistently around his head, alighting sometimes on the sleeves of his jacket, only to flit away again and continue their whirling aerial dance around him.
For an hour the roar of the fusillade continued, not steadily, but redoubling in intensity at times, then slackening again, but continuing always.
Hussars came riding out from among the trees. One of them said to Warner that the ambulances across the Récollette were very busy.
Another, an officer, remarked that the Forest was swarming with Uhlans who were fighting on foot. Asked by Asticot whether the Battalion d'Afrique had gone in, the officer answered rather coolly that it was going in then with the bayonet, and that the world would lose nothing if it were annihilated.
After he had ridden on up the road, Asticot spat elaborately, and employed the word "coquin" – a mild explosion in deference to Sister Eila.
More cavalry emerged from the woods, coming out in increasing numbers, and all taking the direction of Ausone.
An officer halted and called out to Sister Eila.
"It goes very well for us. The Bat. d'Af. got into them across the river! The Uhlans are running their horses! – Everywhere they're swarming out of the woods like driven hares! We turn them by Ausone! A bientôt! God bless the Grey Sisters!"
Everywhere cavalry came trampling and crowding out of the woods and cantering away toward the north, hussars mostly, at first, then chasseurs-à-cheval, an entire brigade of these splendid lancers, pouring out into the road and taking the Ausone route at a gallop.
More motor cycles flashed past; then half a dozen automobiles, in which officers were seated examining maps; then up the road galloped dragoon lancers, wearing grey helmet slips and escorting three light field guns, the drivers of which were also dragoons – a sight Warner had never before seen.
An officer, wearing a plum-colored band of velvet around his red cap, and escorted by a lancer, came from the direction of Ausone, leaned from his saddle, and shook the ambulance chauffeur awake.
"Drive back toward Saïs," he said. "They are taking care of our people across the river, and you may be needed below!" He saluted the Sisters of Charity: "A biplane has fallen by the third pontoon. You may be needed there," he explained.
Sister Eila rose; her face was ashen.
"What biplane, Major?" she asked unsteadily.
"I don't know. British, I think. It came down under their shrapnel like a bird with a broken wing."
He rode on. Warner aided the Sisters of Charity to their seats. Then he and Asticot jumped aboard.
As they turned slowly, two wheels describing a circle through the dusty grass of the ditch, half a dozen mounted gendarmes trotted out of the woods with sabers drawn.
Behind them came four mounted hussars. A man walked in the midst of them. There was a rope around his neck, the end of which was attached to the saddle of one of the troopers.
At the same moment a sort of howl came from Asticot; he half rose, his fingers curling up like claws; his expression had become diabolical. Then he sank back on his seat.
The ambulance rolled forward faster, faster toward Saïs, where a biplane had come down into the river.
But Asticot had forgotten; and ever his blazing eyes were turned backward where, among four troopers, Wildresse walked with a rope around his neck and his clenched fists tied behind him.