The Quest of Glory. Bowen Marjorie

growing near, and the loud humming of grasshoppers persistently—no, he thought, that did not come in the wheat, but in the short dried grass, burnt gold as new clay by the sun; the sun—that sun he had scarcely seen since he left Paris.

      A shuddering drowsiness overcame him; his head fell on his bosom, and he sank to sleep.

      When he woke it was with a sense of physical pain and the sensation that light was falling about him in great flakes; his clearing senses told him that this was the dawn, and that he was giddy. He sat up, to find himself in a natural alcove of rock overgrown with a grey dry moss frozen and glittering; a jutting point partially shut off his vision, but he could see enough of dead men and horses and painfully moving troops in the strip of ravine immediately below him. He unfolded his cloak from his stiff limbs, and by the aid of his sword rose to his feet. As he did so, he raised his eyes, and then gave an involuntary cry of wonder and pleasure.

      Immediately behind him was a silver fir, perhaps a hundred feet high, as high at least as a village steeple, rising up, branch on branch, till it tapered to a perfect finish; and in the flat topmost boughs the sun, struggling through frowning blank grey clouds, rested with a melancholy radiance.

      The Marquis had seen many such trees in Bohemia, and there was nothing extraordinary that he should, unwittingly, have slept under one; yet his breath was shaken at the sight of the tall, unspoilt beauty of this common silver fir with the sun in the upper branches, and he could not tell why.

      He supported himself against the trunk and closed his eyes for a moment; his body was stabbed with pain, and his head seemed filled with restless waves of sensation. He had never been robust, and it had often been a keen trouble to him that he could not support hardship like some men, like most soldiers. He set his teeth and with an effort opened his eyes.

      The first sight they met was that of a woman riding a white horse coming round the fir tree.

      He knew her instantly for the Countess Koklinska, and she evidently knew him, for she reined up her horse, which she rode astride like a man, and looked down at him with a direct glance of recognition.

      “I have forgotten your name,” she said, “but I remember you, Monsieur. You are ill,” she added.

      He blushed that she should see his weakness, and mastered himself sufficiently to step to her stirrup.

      “I found a lodging in Pürgitz,” she said, “and food; but there has been great suffering among your men.”

      Her attire was the same as when he had seen her last—barbaric and splendid, dark furs, scarlet powdered with gold, turquoise velvet and crimson satin; her face was pinched and sallow, but her eyes were clear and expressive under the thick long lashes.

      “I wish we had no women with us,” said the Marquis faintly.

      She dismounted before he had divined her intentions, and drew a silver flask from her sash, and held it out to him in her white fur gloved hands.

      “Only a little poor wine,” she murmured humbly, and she had the cup ready and the red wine poured out.

      He thanked her gravely and drank with distaste; their heavy gloves touched as he handed the horn goblet back to her and again their eyes met.

      In the pale, clear winter morning he looked dishevelled, pallid, and sad, but his eyes were steady, and held the same look as had lightened them in the chapel of St. Wenceslas.

      “If there are no more storms, we shall do very well,” he remarked quietly. “I think there are no more than twenty leagues to Eger, and M. de Saxe took this route last year with but little loss.”

      “Not in this weather,” returned the Countess Carola. “And M. de Belleisle is not Maurice de Saxe.”

      Both her remarks were true, but the Marquis would not confirm them; he bowed gravely, as if displeased, and passed down the rocky path.

      She remained beside the silver fir looking after him. The cold clouds had closed over the feeble sun and the wind blew more icy; all the sounds of a moving camp came with a sharp clearness through the pure, glacial air.

      The Marquis made his way up the ascent to where his regiment bivouacked. His progress was slow; the sky became darker and lower as he ascended, and his way was marked by the frozen dead and the unconscious dying. He turned a point of rock to see the figure of Georges d’Espagnac standing at the edge of a little precipice fanning some glimmering sticks into a flame. Then the snow began; suddenly a few flakes, then a dense storm that blended heaven and earth in one whirl of white and cold.

CHAPTER VI

       ON THE HEIGHTS

       Table of Contents

      The snow fell without a break for three days; on the morning of the fourth it ceased a little, and by the time M. de Belleisle had reached Chiesch stopped.

      The army had now been a week on the road, and the Maréchal hoped by a forced march to reach Eger, on the borders of Bavaria, with those who remained of the thirty thousand men who had marched out of Prague.

      The famous régiment du roi, reduced to half their number, had fallen out of the vanguard, and stumbled along as best they might through the rocky ravines and high mounting roads. There was no longer any order in the army; the retreat had been one horror of death; men fell every moment, and were quickly buried in the silent snow; the wretched refugees died by the hundred. The waste of life was appalling; M. de Vauvenargues felt sick and delirious from the constant spectacle of this helpless agony; men dropped to right and left of him, he passed them at every step on the route; two of his fellow-officers had died the same night; it was like a shrieking nightmare to the Marquis to have to leave them, carrion in the snow; and now the strength of young Georges d’Espagnac began to fail; both had long ago lost their horses; M. de Biron himself was walking; there was indeed scarcely an animal left in the army; gun carriages and wagons had been abandoned all along the route as the mules died.

      As the sombre evening obscured the awful sights along the line of march, the thing that the Marquis had been dreading for the last two days happened: Georges d’Espagnac lurched and fell insensible by his side.

      M. de Biron looked over his shoulder.

      “Poor child,” he murmured; then, to the Marquis, “It is death to stop; you can do no good. Come on.”

      But M. de Vauvenargues shook his head and drew the wasted young figure out of the ghastly march.

      A wagon with a broken wheel rested close by with two dead mules still in the traces and the corpse of a fair-haired woman flung across them, just as she had crawled out of the way. The Marquis wondered vaguely why they should have dragged this wagon so far; the covering at the back was open, and the heavy canvas flaps rose and fell sluggishly in the bitter wind, while from the interior had fallen a silver dessert service that glittered curiously on the thick snow and some rolls of straw-coloured silk that the Marquis had once seen hanging on the walls of M. de Belleisle’s room in the Hradcany castle.

      He winced at the bitter irony of it; yet the rolls of silk, when shaken out, were some covering for the young Lieutenant, and the wagon was some protection from the wind.

      Beyond this he could do nothing; he knelt and took d’Espagnac’s head on his knee for greater warmth, and waited.

      It was little over a week since he had looked at the beautiful inspired face turned upwards in the chapel of St. Wenceslas; he gazed down now at the poor head on his lap, and the tears rose under his lids.

      Georges d’Espagnac was wasted till his blue uniform, tarnished and torn, hung on him loosely; his face was so thin that even the hollows in the temples showed clearly and of a bluish tinge, while the lips were strained and distorted; all powder and dressing had left his hair, which hung in a mass of damp locks of a startling brightness about his shoulders; his right cheek was bruised by the fall from the