Adventure Tales 6. H. Bedford-Jones

the waves of dead men as the tide had ebbed and flowed. Myself? I believe that when mankind is in travail, an anguish too great to be borne alone, it flies to Deity as a child to its mother’s skirt, or as chicks to the maternal wing.

      “It is inconceivable, intolerable, that God should look down a mere spectator upon their agony as from a celestial grandstand. And so there are portents in the sky, and gods fighting with men, and legends passing from one to another the children of hope and fear.”

      “Merely legends?” I asked.

      Lieutenant Paradis shrugged.

      “Who can say? Let me repeat what a great philosopher has written: That with so many hundreds of thousands of lusty young souls cut off instantly and in the full sway of the most violent passions, it is inconceivable that they should at once go to their abiding place; rather must the earth be girdled by a stratum of spiritual unrest, reacting upon our minds in many singular and mysterious ways.”

      Under the waning stars, and to the solemn accompaniment of the slow-coming dawn, Paradis related to me the miracle whereby De Voulx, though long asleep in his coffin, returned to save the village of his forebears from the slime of the green-gray German horde.

      * * * *

      Three men sat about a little table in the sacristy of the old parish church of St. Leu in Breaux. It was early fall, the third year of the great war; and save for these three there remained no living inhabitant in the town. All had departed, bearing with them such valuables as could be gathered up before the German onrush.

      For days the unfortunates from scores of similar villages to the eastward had streamed through Breaux, pausing long enough to rest for an hour and to whisper of the unspeakable woe that had overtaken their homes.

      Breaux was an ancient town, but one never looming large in the pages of history. Its one seignorial family, that of De Voulx, had produced no scions of the first rank. They had been provincial lordlings, stepping high upon the cobbled streets of the town dominated by their rambling château, but seeming ill at ease whenever they, on rare occasions, journeyed to Versailles.

      By and large they had dealt wisely and kindly with their tenants and retainers. One of them had saved the town from sack during the Spanish wars. Tradition had it that the very earliest of the name had beaten back the marauding bands of Teutons.

      The last of his line, Colonel Eugen, one-time commander of Napoleon’s Young Guard, seems to have been a pompous, fussy little man, of no particular ability but unquestioned courage. He was considered to bear some slight resemblance to the great commander himself: a likeness he did nothing to minimize by his dress, carriage, and demeanor.

      He died in Breaux upon returning from the siege of Acre; and,in his last delirium, had risen in his bed and remarked in his most characteristic manner that if ever Breaux were in danger of capture they had but to open his sepulchre and he would come forth and save the town, even as the De Voulx overlords had ever preserved it inviolate.

      Whereupon he fittingly died without spoiling his utterance by an anticlimax; and he lay in a leaden coffin in the vault of St. Leu, beneath the feet of the three solitary citizens of Breaux, who were, in fact, discussing him in the sacristy lighted by a pair of great altar candles.

      The curé, Father Jean, had remained to secure the jeweled ciborium containing the consecrated host and the parish register, together with such portable relics as he could save. Across from him sat M. Pelletier, a heavy, red-faced man with beard cut square like a spade, and who, as mayor, had busied himself securing certain of the town records.

      The third was of peasant type, with a face cross-hatched with innumerable lines indicative of honesty, shrewdness, and obstinacy in equal proportions.

      It was he, the grandson of the orderly of the late Colonel de Voulx, who was addressing the other two, the big men of his little world, whom he sought to coerce with his dogged persistence, accompanied by many shrugs, outthrustings of palms, elevating of brows, and clicks of his tongue against the roof of his toothless mouth.

      “It is I who tell you, mon père, and you, monsieur le maire, I who had the story from my grandsire (whom the blessed saints have in their keeping!), and after him, from my father, also a pious Christian. It has been kept in our family as a sacred trust. Pardieu! For just such an occasion as this, messieurs! For, as he lay dying, his soul already straining at the halter, if you will permit the saying, mon père—”

      The aged priest raised his hand. Both he and Pelletier, and indeed every one in Breaux, down to the gamins who played about its one street, knew the story by heart.

      “The minds of dying men wander in blind paths, my son! If I were to consider all the pitiful last words to which I have listened here in our parish during the last half century—”

      The old man interrupted him impatiently.

      “Of a surety! My own blessed father called for his pipe—and he had not used tobacco for twenty years. But one is to distinguish between the babbling of a simple peasant and the inspired prophecy of a great one like a De Voulx, whose ancestors have preserved this our town since history was written!”

      Father Jean smiled faintly.

      “Pierre, my son, it is not meet that we should violate the grave of one given sepulture according to the rites of the church, merely to disprove an old wives’ tale.”

      Pierre fairly sputtered with indignation; and ere he could find his tongue again the third man, the Mayor Pelletier, opened his firm lips for the first time.

      “You know, begging your pardon, monsieur le curé, for whom I have only love and respect, and you, friend Pierre, that I am an atheist. Religion harms no one—and doubtless consoles old women. As for me, when I die you may serve me as you will. I am dead for all time—as dead as my faithful old dog Bidou, and less worthy of immortality!

      “No more than I believe in Father Jean’s rites do I credit good Pierre’s miracles. We do wrong to waste time here. We are custodians of town property. At any moment the Huns may clatter down our street. I haven’t the least superstitious fear against opening our eminent towns-man’s leaden casket—but I see no sense in taking time to do so!”

      Pierre waved his knotted hands frantically.

      “Name of a name of God! You don’t see, and you don’t believe, and you this and that! How could Colonel de Voulx, with his last breath, bid us commit a sacrilege upon himself, and he a good Christian, shriven by the pious Père Hyacinthe, your predecessor, my father? And you, monsieur, why waste in empty words time enough to open his coffin twice over? See!”

      Pierre drew from his blouse a keen adz and brandished it.

      “It is made sharp for biting into the lead! If indeed Colonel de Voulx spoke idly; no harm can come of it; do not the thrice accursed boches open every sealed coffin of the blessed dead, seeking for jewels? And think you they will spare this one?”

      Father Jean glanced half-humorously, half-sadly into the steady eyes of Pelletier and shrugged helplessly. The latter spoke.

      “There are no miracles. There never were! But there are always facts; and one of them is this: the German cavalry will snap us up like trout while we argue here, and with us the records, and that jeweled gewgaw you value so highly, Père Jean!”

      Pierre rallied for his final argument. He controlled his excitement with a violent effort.

      “Listen, then! It is true that you have heard my story many times. It is true that every breeched lad in Breaux knows it by heart. And I, Pierre, tell you they also believe it And when they shall return, some day, and, fumbling amid the ashes and broken glass, shall seek to trace that place where once burned their hearth fires, think you they shall not say: ‘If only Père Jean, and that donkey of a Pelletier, and old doddering Pierre had but summoned forth Colonel de Voulx from his tomb, Breaux would have been saved!’”

      He leaned back, the breath whistling between his grinning lips, his shrewd, puckered old eyes, bright and black still, triumphantly seeking theirs.

      Abruptly