The Forest of Swords: A Story of Paris and the Marne by Joseph A. Altsheler (i like reading TXT) 📖

"This looks promising. You're a clever man, Weber, and my debt to you is too big for me."

"Don't think about it. Be careful and don't make any noise. Here's the other stair. You'd better hold to my coat again."

They stole softly down the stair, crossed an unused room, went down another narrow, unused passage, and then, when Weber opened a door, John felt the cool air of the night blowing upon his face. When the attempt at escape began, he had not been so enthusiastic, because he was leaving Julie behind, but with every step his eagerness grew and the free wind brought with it a sort of intoxication. He did not doubt now that he would make good his flight. Weber, that fast friend of his, was a wonderful man. He worked miracles. Everything came out as he predicted it would, and he would work more miracles.

"Where are we now?" asked John.

"This door is by the side of the kitchens. A little to the left is an extensive conservatory, nearly all the glass of which has been shattered by a shell, but that fact makes it all the more useful as a path for us. If we reach it unobserved we can creep through the mass of flowers and shrubbery to a large fishpond which lies just beyond it. You're a good swimmer, as I know—and you can swim along its edge until you reach the shrubbery on the other side. Then you ought to find an opening by which you can reach the French army."

"And you, Weber?"

"I? Oh, I must stay here. The Prince of Auersperg is a man of great importance. He is high in the confidence of the Kaiser. Besides his royal rank he commands one of the German armies. If I am to secure precious information for France it must be done in this house."

"Come away with me, Weber. You've risked enough already. They'll catch you and you know the fate of spies. I feel like a criminal or coward abandoning you to so much danger, after all that you've done for me."

"Thank you for your good words, Mr. Scott, but it's impossible for me to go. Keep in the shadow of the wall, and a dozen steps will take you to the conservatory."

John wrung the Alsatian's hand, stepped out, and pressed himself against the side of the house. The breeze still blew upon his face, revivifying and intoxicating. The lazy, feathery clouds were yet drifting before the moon and stars.

He saw to his right the gleam of a bayonet as a sentinel walked back and forth and he saw another to his left. His heart beat high with hope. He was merely a mote in infinite night, and surely they could not see him.

He walked swiftly along in the shadow of the house, and then sprang into the conservatory, where he crouched between two tall rose bushes. He waited there a little while, breathing hard, but he had not been observed. From his rosy shelter he could still see the sentinels on either side, walking up and down, undisturbed. Around him was a frightful litter. The shell, the history of which he would never know, had struck fairly in the center of the place, and it must have burst in a thousand fragments. Scarcely a pane of glass had been left unbroken, and the great pots, containing rare fruits and flowers, were mingled mostly in shattered heaps. It was a pitiable wreck, and it stirred John, although he had seen so many things so much worse.

He walked a little distance in a stooping position, and then stood up among some shrubs, tall enough to hide him. He noticed a slight dampness in the air, and he saw, too, that the feathery clouds were growing darker. The faint quiver in the air brought with it, as always, the rumble of the guns, but he believed that it was not a blended sound. There was real thunder on the horizon, where the French lay, and then he saw a distant flash, not white like that of a searchlight, but like yellow lightning. Rain, a storm perhaps, must be at hand. He had read that nearly all the great battles in the civil war in his own country had been followed at once by violent storms of thunder, lightning and rain. Then why not here, where immense artillery combats never ceased?

Near the end of the conservatory he paused and looked back at the house. Every window was dark. There must be light inside, but shutters were closed. His heart throbbed with intense gratitude to Weber. Without him escape would have been impossible. He would make his way to the French. He would find Lannes and together in some way they would rescue Julie, Julie so young and so beautiful, held in the castle of the medieval baron. In the lowering shadows the house became a castle and Auersperg had always been of the Middle Ages.

The wind freshened and a few drops of rain struck his face. He stood boldly erect now, unafraid of observation, and picked a way through the mass of broken glass and overturned shrubbery toward the end of the conservatory, seeing beyond it a gleam of water which must be the big fishpond.

He turned to the left and reached the edge of the pond just as four figures stepped from the dusk, their raised rifles pointing at him. The shock was so great that, driven by some unknown but saving impulse, he threw himself forward into the water just as the soldiers fired. He heard the four rifles roaring together. Then he swam below water to the far edge of the pond and came up under the shelter of its circling shrubbery, raising above its surface only enough of his face for breath.

As his eyes cleared he saw the four soldiers standing at the far edge of the pond, looking at the water. Doubtless they were waiting for his body to reappear, as his action, half fall, half spring, and the roaring of the rifles had been so close together that they seemed a blended movement.

He was trembling all over from intense nervous exertion and excitement, but his mind steadied enough for him to observe the soldiers. Undoubtedly they were talking together, as he saw them making the gestures of men who speak, but, even had he heard them, he could not have understood their German. They were watching for his body, and as it did not reappear they might make the circle of the pond looking for it. He intended, in such an event, to leap out and run, but the elements were intereceding in his favor. Thunder now preponderated greatly in that rumble on the western horizon, and a blaze of yellow lightning played across the surface of the pond. It was followed by a rush of rain and the soldiers turned back toward the house, evidently sure that they had not missed.

John drew himself out of the water and climbed up the bank. His knees gave way under him and he sank to the ground. Excitement and emotion had been so violent that he was robbed of strength, but the condition lasted only a minute or two. Then he rose and began to pick a way.

The rain was driving hard, and it had grown so dark that one could not see far. But he felt that the German sentinels now would seek a little shelter from the wrath of the skies, and keeping in the shelter of a hedge he passed by the stables, where many of the hussars and Uhlans slept, through an orchard, the far side of which was packed with automobiles, and thence into a wood, where he believed at last that he was safe.

He stopped here a little while in the lee of a great oak to protect himself from the driving rain, and he noticed then that it was but a passing shower, sent, it seemed then to him, as a providential aid. The part of the rumble that was real thunder was dying. The yellow flare of the lightning stopped and the rain swept off to the east. The moon and stars were coming out again.

John tried to see the château, but it was hidden from him by trees. They would miss him there, and then they would know that it was he whom the soldiers had fired upon at the edge of the pond. All of them would believe that he was dead, and he remembered suddenly that Julie, who was there among them, would believe it, too. Would she grieve? Or would he merely be one of the human beings passing through her life, fleeting and forgotten, like the shower that had just gone? It was true that he had escaped, but he might be killed in some battle before she was rescued from Auersperg—if she was rescued.

These thoughts were hateful, and turning into the road by which they had come to the château he ran down it. He ran because he wanted motion, because he wished to reach the French army as quickly as he could, and help Lannes organize for the rescue of Julie.

He ran a long distance, because his excitement waned slowly, and because the severe exercise made the blood course rapidly through his veins, counteracting the effects of his cold and wetting. When he began to feel weary he turned out of the road, knowing that it was safer in the fields. He had the curious belief or impression now that the black shower was all arranged for his benefit. Providence was merely making things even. The soldiers had been brought upon him when the chances were a hundred to one against him, and then the shower had been sent to cover him, when the chances were a hundred to one against that, too.

He saw far to the south a sudden faint radiance and he knew that it was the last of the lightning. The little feathery clouds, which looked so friendly and pleasant against the blue of the sky, came back and the moaning on the western horizon toward which he was traveling was wholly that of the guns.

He heard a noise over his head, a mixture of a whistle and a scream, and he knew that a shell was passing high. He walked on, and heard another. But they could not be firing at him. He was still that mere mote in the infinite darkness, but, looking back for the bursting of the shells, he saw a blaze leap up near the point from which he had come.

A cold shiver seized him. The range was that of the château, and Julie was there. The French gunners could have no knowledge that their own people were prisoners in the building, and if one of those huge shells burst in it, ruin and destruction would follow. The conservatory had been a silent witness of what flying metal could do. He stopped, appalled. He had been wrong to leave without Julie, and yet he could have done nothing else. It was impossible to foresee a shelling of the château by the French themselves.

The screaming and whistling came again, but he did not see any explosion near the château. One could not tell much from such a swift and passing sound, but he concluded that it was a German shell replying. He had seen a German battery near the house and it would not remain quiet under bombardment.

He had no doubt that the French gunners, having got the range, would keep it. Somebody, perhaps an aeroplane or an officer with flags in a tree, was signaling. It was horrible, this murderous mechanism by which men fired at targets miles away, targets which they could not see, but which they hit nevertheless. Every pulse beating hard, John shook his fist at the invisible German guns and the invisible French guns alike.

Then he recovered himself with an angry shake and began to run again. He knew now that he must go forward and secure a French force for rescue. But no matter how much he urged himself on, a great power was pulling at him, and it was Julie Lannes, a prisoner of the Germans in the château. Often he stopped and looked back, always in the same direction. Twice more he saw shells burst in the neighborhood of the house, and then his heart would beat hard, but after brief hesitation he would always pursue his course once more toward the French army.

He did not know the time, but he believed it to be well past midnight. He had his watch, but his immersion in the fish pond had caused it to stop. Still, the feel of the air made him believe that he was in the morning hours. Shells continued