"Mademoiselle Hilda, a little music, if you please," he said with a finality.

"You play," said Hilda to Scotch, sliding off the soap-box which served to uphold the artist to her instrument.

"Hilda, you make me tired," chided Scotch. "The Commandant has given you his orders."

"Oh, all right," said Hilda.

She played pleasantly with feeling and technique. More of her hidden life came to an utterance with her music than at other times. She led her notes gently to a close.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," said the Commandant from his seat in the shadows on the sofa, "parlez-vous francais?"

This was his regular procedure. Why did he say it? They never could guess. He knew that the women, all three, understood French--Mrs.

Bracher and Scotch speaking it fluently, Hilda, as became an American, haltingly. Did he not carry on most of his converse with them in French--always, when eloquent or sentimental? But unfailingly he used his formula, when he was highly pleased. They decided he must once have known some fair foreigner who could only faintly stammer in his native tongue, and that the habit of address had then become fixed upon him for moments of emotion.

He repeated his question.

"Oui," responded the girl. He kissed his fingers lightly to her, and waved the tribute in her direction, as if it could be wafted across the room.

"Chere artiste," said he, with a voice of conviction.

"And now the bacarolle," he pleaded.

"There are many bacarolles," she objected.

"I know, I know," he said, "and yet, after all, there is only one bacarolle."

"All right," she answered, obediently, and played on. The music died away, and the girl in her fought against the response that she knew was coming. She began turning over sheets of music on the rack. But the Commandant was not to be balked.

"Parlez-vous francais?" he inquired, "vous, Mademoiselle Hilda."

"Oui, mon Commandant," she answered.

"Chere artiste," he said; "chere artiste."

"Ah, those two voices," he went on with a sigh; "they go with you, wherever you are. It is music, that night of love and joy. And here we sit--"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Mrs. Bracher, who did not care to have an evening of gaiety sag to melancholy; "how about a little Cesar Franck?"

"Yes, surely," agreed the Commandant, cheerily; "our own composer, you know, though we never gave him his due."

Hilda ran through the opening of the D Minor.

"Now it is your turn," said she.

"My fingers are something stiff, with these cold nights by the window,"

replied the Commandant, "but certainly I will endeavor to play."

He seated himself at the instrument.

"Chere artiste," he murmured to the girl, who was retreating to the lounge.

The Commandant played well. He needed no notes, for he was stored with remembered bits. He often played to them of an evening, before he took his turn on watch. He played quietly along for a little. Out of the dark at their north window, there came the piping of a night bird. Birds were the only creatures seemingly untouched by the war. The fields were crowded thick with the bodies of faithful cavalry and artillery horses.

Dogs and cats had wasted away in the seared area. Cattle had been mowed down by machine guns. Heavy sows and their tiny yelping litter, were shot as they trundled about, or, surviving the far-cast invisible death, were spitted for soldiers' rations. And with men, the church-yard and the fields, and even the running streams, were choked. Only birds of the air, of all the living, had remained free of their element, floating over the battling below them, as blithe as if men had not sown the lower s.p.a.ces with slaughter.

And now in this night of spring, one was calling to its mate. The Commandant heard it, and struck its note on the upper keyboard.

"Every sound in nature has its key," he said; "the cry of the little bird has it, and the surf at Nieuport."

"And the sh.e.l.ls?" asked Hilda.

"Yes, the sh.e.l.ls, they have it," he answered gravely; "each one of them, as it whistles in the air, is giving its note. You have heard it?"

"Yes," answered Hilda.

"Why, this," he said. He held his hands widely apart to indicate the keyboard--"this is only a little human dipping, like a bucket, into the ocean waves of sound. It can't give us back one little part of what is.

Only a poor, stray sound out of the many can get itself registered. The rest drift away, lost birds on the wing. The notes in between, the splintered notes, they cannot sound on our little instruments."

A silence had fallen on the group. Out of the hushed night that covered them, a moaning grew, that they knew well. One second, two seconds of it, and then the thud fell somewhere up the line. As the sh.e.l.l was wailing in the air, a hidden string, inside the frame, quivered through its length, and gave out an under-hum. It was as if a far away call had rung it up. One gun alone, out of all the masked artillery, had found the key, and, from seven miles away, played the taut string.

"There is one that registers," said the Commandant; "the rest go past and no echo here."

Firmly he struck the note that had vibrated.

"That gun is calling for me," said he; "the others are lost in the night. But that gun will find me."

"You talk like a soothsayer," said Mrs. Bracher, with a sudden gesture of her hand and arm, as if she were brushing away a mist.

"It's all folly," she went on, "I don't believe it. Good heavens, what is that?" she added, as a footstep crunched in the hall-way. "You've got me all unstrung, you and your croaking."

An orderly entered and saluted the Commandant.

"They've got the range of the Station, mon Commandant," he reported; "they have just sent a sh.e.l.l into the tracks. It is dangerous in the look-out of the house. Do you wish Victor to remain?"

"I will relieve him," said the Commandant, and he left swiftly and silently, as was his wont.

Hilda returned to the piano, and began softly playing, with the hush-pedal on. The two women drew close around her. Suddenly she released the pedal, and lifted her hands from the keys, as if they burned her. One string was still faintly singing which she had not touched, the string of the key that the Commandant had struck.

"Mercy, child, what ails you?" exclaimed Mrs. Bracher. "You've all got the fidgets to-night."

"That string again," said the girl.

She rose from the piano, and went out into the night. They heard her footsteps on the road.

"Hilda, Hilda," called Scotch, loudly.

"Leave her alone, she is fey," said Mrs. Bracher. "I know her in these moods. You can't interfere. You must let her go."

"We can at least see where she goes," urged Scotch.