He drew off both shoes, descended the stairs on the flat pads of his large, bony feet, listening all the while.

Candle-light streamed out into the corridor from her open bedroom door; and he crept to the sill and peered in, searching the place with small, pale eyes.

At first he noticed nothing to interest him, then, all in an instant, his gaze fell upon Madam Death under her prison of gla.s.s.

There she sat, her great bulging abdomen distended with eggs, her lambent eyes shining with the terrible pa.s.sion of antic.i.p.ation. For one thing only she had been created. That accomplished she died. And there she crouched awaiting the fulfillment of her life's cycle with the blazing eyes of a demon.

From the cafe below came the cautious murmur of voices. The young man already knew what they were whispering about; or, if he did not know he no longer cared.

The patches of bright colour in his sunken cheeks had died out in an ashen pallor. As far as he was concerned the world was now ended. And he knew it.

He went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed's edge. His little, pale eyes wandered about the white room; the murmur of voices below was audible all the while.

After a few moments' patient waiting, his gaze rested again on Madam Death, squatting there with wings sloped, and the skull and bones staring at him from her head and distended abdomen.

After all there was an odd resemblance between himself and Madam Death. He had been born to fulfill one function, it appeared. So had she. And now, in his case as in hers, death was immediately to follow. This was sentiment, not science--the blind lobe of the German brain balancing grotesquely the reasoning lobe.

The voices below had ceased. Presently he heard a cautious step on the stair.

He had a little pill-box in his pocket. Methodically, without haste, he drew it out, chose one white pellet, and, holding it between his bony thumb and forefinger, listened.

Yes, somebody was coming up the stairs, very careful to make no sound.

Well--there were various ways for a Death's Head Hussar to die for his War Lord. All were equally laudable. G.o.d--the G.o.d of Germany--the celestial friend and comrade of his War Lord--would presently correct him if he was transgressing military discipline or the etiquette of Kultur. As for the levelled rifles of the execution squad, he preferred another way....

_This_ way!...

His eyes were already glazing when the burly form of Sticky Smith filled the doorway.

He looked down at Madam Death under the tumbler beside him, then lifted his head and gazed at Smith with blinded eyes.

"Swine!" he said complacently, swaying gently forward and striking the floor with his face.

CHAPTER XXIV

BUBBLES

An east wind was very likely to bring gas to the trenches north of the Sainte Lesse salient. A north wind, according to season, brought snow or rain or fog upon British, French, Belgian and Boche alike. Winds of the south carried distant exhalations from orchards and green fields into the pitted waste of ashes where that monstrous desolation stretched away beneath a thundering iron rain which beat all day, all night upon the dead flesh of the world.

But the west wind was the vital wind, flowing melodiously through the trees--a clean, aromatic, refreshing wind, filling the sickened world with life again.

Sometimes, too, it brought the pleasant music of the bells into far-away trenches, when the little bell-mistress of Sainte Lesse played the carillon. And when her friend, the great bell, Bayard, spoke through the resounding sky of France to a million men-at-arms in blue and steel, who were steadily forging h.e.l.l's manacles for the uncaged Hun, the loyal western wind carried far beyond the trenches an ominous iron vibration that meant doom for the Beast.

And the Beast heard, leering skyward out of pale pig-eyes, but did not comprehend.

At the base corral down in the meadow, mules had been scarce recently, because a transport had been torpedoed. But the next transport from New Orleans escaped; the dusty column had arrived at Sainte Lesse from the Channel port, convoyed by American muleteers, as usual; new mules, new negroes, new Yankee faces invaded the town once more.

However, it signified little to the youthful mistress-of-the-bells, Maryette Courtray, called "Carillonnette," for her Yankee lover still lay in his distant hospital--her muleteer, "Djack." So mules might bray, and negroes fill the Sainte Lesse meadows with their shouting laughter; and the lank, hawk-nosed Yankee muleteers might saunter clanking into the White Doe in search of meat or drink or tobacco, or a glimpse of the pretty bell-mistress, for all it meant to her.

Her Djack lived; that was what occupied her mind; other men were merely men--even his comrades, Sticky Smith and Kid Glenn, a.s.sumed individuality to distinguish them from other men only because they were Djack's friends.

And as for all other muleteers, they seemed to her as alike as Chinamen, leaving upon her young mind a general impression of long, thin legs and necks and the keen eyes of hunting falcons.

She had washing to do that morning. Very early she climbed up into the ancient belfry, wound the drum so that the bells would play a few bars at the quarters and before each hour struck; and also in order that the carillon might ring mechanically at noon in case she had not returned to take her place at the keyboard with her wooden gloves.

There was a light west wind rippling through the tree tops; and everywhere sunshine lay brilliant on pasture and meadow under the purest of cobalt skies.

In the garden her crippled father, swathed in shawls, dozed in his deep chair beside the river-wall, waking now and then to watch the quill on his long bamboo fish-pole, stemming the sparkling current of the little river Lesse.

Sticky Smith, off duty and having filled himself to repletion with cafe-au-lait at the inn, volunteered to act as nurse, attendant, remover of fish and baiter of hook, while Maryette was absent at the stone-rimmed pool where the washing of all Sainte Lesse laundry had been accomplished for hundreds of years.

"You promise not to go away?" she cautioned him in the simple, first-aid French she employed in speaking to him, and pausing with both arms raised to balance the loaded clothes-basket on her head.

"Wee--wee!" he a.s.sured her with dignity. "Je fume mong peep! Je regard le vieux pecher. Voo poovay allay, Mademoiselle Maryette."

She hesitated, then removed the basket from her head and set it on the gra.s.s.

"You are very kind, Monsieur Steek-Smeet. I shall wash your underwear the very first garments I take out of my basket. Thank you a thousand times."

She bent over with sweet solicitude and pressed her lips to her father's withered cheek:

"Au revoir, my father _cheri_. An hour or two at the meadow-_lavoir_ and I shall return to find thee. _Bonne chance, mon pere!_ Thou shalt surely catch a large and beautiful fish for luncheon before I return with my wash."

She swung the basket of wash to her head again without effort, and went her way, following the deeply trodden sheep-path behind the White Doe Inn.

The path wound down through a sloping pasture, across a footbridge spanning an arm of the Lesse which washed the base of the garden wall, then ascended a gentle aclivity among hazel thicket and tall sycamores, becoming for a little distance a shaded wood-path where thrushes sang ceaselessly in the sun-flecked undergrowth.

But at the eastern edge of the copse the little hill fell away into an open, sunny meadow, fragrant with wild-flowers and clover, through which a rivulet ran deep and cold between gra.s.sy banks.

It supplied the drinking water of Sainte Lesse; and a branch of it poured bubbling into the stone-rimmed _lavoir_ where generations of Sainte Lesse maids had scrubbed the linen of the community, kneeling there amid wild flowers and fluttering b.u.t.terflies in the shade of three tall elms.

There was n.o.body at the pool; Maryette saw that as she came out of the hazel copse through the meadow. And very soon she was on her knees at the clear pool's edge, bare of arm and throat and bosom, her blue wool skirts trussed up, and elbow deep in snowy suds.

Overhead the sky was a quivering, royal blue; the earth shimmered in its bath of sunshine; the west wind blowing carried away eastward the reverberations of the distant cannonade, so that not even the vibration of the concussions disturbed Sainte Lesse.

A bullfinch was piping l.u.s.tily in a young tree as she began her task; a blackbird answered from somewhere among the hawthorns with a bewildering series of complicated trills.

As the little mistress-of-the-bells scrubbed and beat the clothes with her paddle, and rinsed and wrung them and soaped them afresh, she sang softly under her breath, to an ancient air of her _pays_, words that she improvised to fit it--_vrai chanson de laveuse_:

"A blackbird whistles I love!

Over the thistles b.u.t.terflies hover, Each with her lover In love.