i!!:-ii??it!?i;!--!' m THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES BY THE SAME AUTHOR UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME THE WHITE PLUMES OF NAVARRE. A Romance of the Wars of Religion With i6 Illustrations by W. H. Marcetson '' One of the most pcnverf til and engrossing stories that have come from Mr. Crockett's prolific pen." — The Scotsman. "A lively, stirring story, which ivill give abundant entertain ment to readers with a taste for adventurous romance." — The DAILY Telegraph. THE MEN OF THE MOUNTAIN 'he shall not escapk,' she ckieu. THE MEN OF THE MOUNTAIN BY S. R. CROCKETT Author of 'The White Plumes of Navarre,' 'The Lilac Sunbonnet,' 'The Seven Wise Men,' 'The Raiders,' etc. With Illustrations by Harold Copping LONDON THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY 4 Bouverie Street and 65 St. Paul's Churchyard, E.G. 1909 'if IS CONTENTS CHAPTER I. The Shadow on the Wall .. i CHAPTER II. The Military Chaplain lo CHAPTER III. La Petite Flore .. .. .. .. .. .. 22 CHAPTER IV. Council of Revision .. .. .. .. .. 29 CHAPTER V. Jonathan and his David.. .. .. .. ,. 27 CHAPTER \I. A Tooth for a Tooth .. .. .. .. .. 43 CHAPTER VII. Sister NoiLiE .. .. .. .. .. •• 5' CHAPTER VI J I. Not Peace, but a Swoku.. 5 + vii Contents CHAPTER IX. The Elder Brother who would not come in .. 63 CHAPTER X. An Enemy within the Gate 69 CHAPTER XI. The Defence of the East Wing 79 CHAPTER XII. The Shadow that Walketh in Darkness ,. .. 90 CHAPTER XIII. The Commandant 99 CHAPTER XIV. The Evening Sacrifice 112 CHAPTER XV. Breslin the Smith 121 CHAPTER XVI. The Wrath of Man 127 CHAPTER XVII. Cross-Examination 137 CHAPTER XVIII. The Man of the Mountain .. .. .. 145 CHAPTER XIX. The Pastor's Day iS5 viii Contents CHAPTER XX. Without God and Without Hope .. .. .. i66 CHAPTER XXI. The Red Revolt .. .. .. .. .. .. 174 CHAPTER XXII. Mother and Son 1S3 CHAPTER XXIII. " Physician, Heal Thyself " .. 193 CHAPTER XXIV. The Trail of the Wild Cat .. .. .. •• '99 CHAPTER XXV. The Search .. .. 213 CHAPTER XXVI. The Post- Off ice of Vercel-Adam 219 CHAPTER XXVII. The Adventures of a Traitor.. . .. .. 227 CHAPTER XXVIII. The Midnight Confession .. .. .. .. 235 CHAPTER XXIX. The Little Schoolmistress Calls up her Reserves 243 CHAPTER XXX. The Fire of Purifying .. .. .. .. .. 254 ix /> Contents CHAPTER XXXI. "And God said, Let there be Light!" .. .. 264 CHAPTER XXXIL He shall Restore Fourfold .. .. . ..271 CHAPTER XXXI IL A Sweet Drop in the Bittf.r 27S CHAPTER XXXIV. The Bitter Cup .. .. .. 2S4 CHAPTER XXXV. "Oh, You Man!" .. .. .. 292 CHAPTER XXXVI. "Not Long A-poing " .. .. .. .. .. 29, CHAPTER XXXVII. Black Leo's Waygoing .. .. 306 CHAPTER XXX\'III. "And there was Light!" .. .. , .. 312 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "he shall not escape," she CRir.D . . Frontispiece Facing pa^^e HIS HANDS WERE WIDE APART AND MADE THE SHAPE OF A CROSS, FOR HIS TIME WAS SHORT . . 6 HE DID IT SO REVERENTLY THAT HIS COMPANION TURNED UPON HIM WITH A TWINKLE . . .12 " AHA, WE HAVE SCENTED YOU OUT, OLD FOX ! " . . 20 "THIS IS THE IDEA OF THE GOVERNMENT!" . . 32 "my mother's HOUSE — THE FARM OF VILI.ARS CHAU- MONT," HE EXPLAINED 40 HIS EYE GLINTING ALONG THE TUBE OF HIS REVOLVER 52 THE YOUNG MAN REMAINED FIXED DURING THE SERVICE (,i "back THERE," HE SHOUTED, " WE MUST FINISH OUR GERMAN IN SOME OTHER WAY .... 83 IN A LOW, THRILLING VOICE, HE BEGAN TO READ OUT THE PSALM 118 "l PRAYED FOR A MAN WHO FROU.^.HT HIS FATHER'S GREY HAIRS IN SORROW TO THE GRAVE" . -152 " LET ME TOUCH YOT^ — A BLIND WOMAN'S HANDS ARE HER EYES" 162 "and you have to say — WHAT?" DEMANDED THE ADVOCATE-BUSHWHACKER 1 72 THERE WITHIN A DOZEN YARDS OF HIM WAS BLACK LEO 202 " BE BROTHERS ONE TO THE OTHER, BECAUSE I, NOfeLIE, AM YOUR SISTER " 226 HALED INCONTINENT ACROSS THF YARD BY THE ARM. 294 xi The Men of the Mountain CHAPTER I. THE SHADOW ON THE WALL n^HE white wall of a cottage house, with the low 1 sun of one of January's latest mornings red upon it ! In the midst, where the long, lime-washed wall of the garden began, the rosy glare was suddenly cut into by the silhouette of a man. He was dressed in frayed black frock-coat and trousers. His hands were behind his back, and his stringy clerical tie — washed to a ribbon — hung dolorously down upon his open vest. But the man was not afraid, although that might well have been excused him, seeing that he was looking into the muzzles of a firing-party of the Von Hartmann's famous Pomeranians. To be exact, this was the Pastor David Alix of the Evangelical Church of Geneva, long-time domiciled in France, and now in deadly peril of his life at the hands of the German invader. Yet he did not look like a "bush-whacker." He was unarmed. Nevertheless he had been caught along with a comrade who carried a rifle, but no uniform. The companion was that heap of tumbled rags on the rubbish-heap at the stable end. It was I B The Men of the Mountain the early morning on a day of Januaiy of the French Year Terrible — that is, 1871. The Jura Hills were all white with snow as far as one could see, and beneath this hamlet of Mouthe the young Doubs gurgled and chafed under its ice mantle. David Alix was to die. The General had said so. There had been too much shooting of his men from behind stone heaps gathered off the Jurassic fields, s'idden spurts of fire out of the clumps of willow along the Doubs, and along the small tributary burns which ray out from it like the backbones of a fish, v.impling and chuckling to themselves till the sound is lost among the green rounded breasts of the mountains. These now are all delicate and soft as David Alix, who knows them so well, looks his last upon them. Or rather, to his eyes they are tinted with red. A kind of rosy bloom lies on their sides and slopes where the morning sun is glinting level along them. Yet the shadows they throw one upon the other are blue. The shadow of the little \\'hite- washed house is a deeper blue, though not so deep as that of the uniform of the firing-party of Trossel's Colberg regiment of Grenadiers. Tall, angry men they are, for it is their sentries who have been " sniped " and their details cut up. Old Von Hart- mann, Major-General of the Third, has come down on purpose himself to see into things. And twenty minutes ago he had fallen into such an anger at the sight of the franc-tirmr and his companion — the slim man clad in black — that he himself had ordered the immediate shooting of the man with the rifle out of hand, and even presided at the drumhead court- 2 The Shadow on the Wall martial upon David Alix. As Von Hartmann spoke no French in any intelligible fashion, and understood still less of that language when spoken, the trial of David Alix was very summary indeed. There were indeed among the officers several who could have enlightened Von Hartmann upon many things, had not the chief been in such a grunting, bull-dog fury that it was not safe for even his own adjutant to cross him. So David Alix was to die — at the age of thirty. All of them had been spent in doing God service, ever since his mother had taught him his texts in the Genevan version, seated down on the logs by the lakeside — logs all peeled and scratched by being hurled into the rock-spotted foam of the Drance. What had these tall Pomeranians against him } He did not understand. They had turned his pockets out — the deep tail-coat pockets of a travelling pastor. But there was nothing there except a slim, limp, morocco-bound Bible of Segond's version, which he had saved up to buy when, a poor student at the New College of Edinburgh, he could ill afford the price. There was also much bread, in little, hard, round loaves, which his mother had made — a whole provision of them indeed — and, what they looked at longest and most severely, a paper with a list of names neatly written out in the Pastor's own hand. In all this to David Alix there seemed nothinGr worthy of death. Nor with a more proven brigade would there have been — say one of Unser Fritz's " blooded " regim^ents, which had fought right through from Worth to the " crowning mercy '" of Paris. But 3 B 2 The Men of the Mountain these were fresh from the Baltic edges. They had marched long distances. They had participated in none of the great victories, gained no medals, been mentioned in no despatches, and yet ever since they entered the hills their flanks had been scourged with dropping fire. It was certainly trying — a long-range bullet spatting into the column, and lo ! a lad whose mother was waiting for a letter from him, fell forward with a suddenly whitened face among the trampled snow. These things had told against David Alix. Further- more, the little hard loaves with which his pockets were stuffed had, in the opinion of the Trossel's Grenadiers, been destined to feed and sustain the " bush-whackers " who, at eve and morn, slew their comrades! "-^ David Alix, Pasteur" — a likely story! Had he not the roll of a whole company of murderers, or their abettors, in his pocket } And it is certain that neither his position as an ex-citizen of Geneva, nor the Bible bought in St. Andrew's Square, would have saved him had he not fallen on his knees, and with his hands clasped prayed for the ignorant men who, without reason, were sending him out of life ; and, because they knew not what they did, breaking his old mother's heart away down yonder by Le Lochle. David Alix had no fear of death for its own sake. He commended his mother to God and his soul to the Saviour. He had often preached to his people that in the Day of the Shadowed Valley, neither he nor they should be forsaken. And now, when that day was come, lo, it was so ! Then he rose up to 4 The Shadow on the Wall his feet, and, like his Huguenot ancestors who had fled Genevawards from the " dragonnades," he betook himself to sing his death-psalm. It says something for the mark that the College-on-the-Mound (in the town of Edinburgh) sets upon her men, that now in his hour the foreigner, David Alix, who had sat upon her benches but three short winter sessions, sent out clear and strong the morning song with which, in that time, the day of study was opened : " God is our refuge and our strength, In straits a present aid ; Therefore, although the earth remove, We will not be afraid." Now a little way up the street of the village of Mouthe, in a cottage with its gable to the narrow street of trampled snow and mud, a weary chaplain of King William of Prussia's army was tr}'ing to get some broken slumber among the rattling of drums and the clear singing of the clarions. Hermann Falk was huge in person, rubicund in feature, but tramp- ling and overbearing in manner to men and officers alike. But his heart was strong, and the men loved him because it was reported in the regiment that he was the only man who dared confront the angers of the Colonel. Nay, even the tough old General Von Hartmann had been known to give the black skirts and muslin bands of his emphatic chaplain a wide berth. At the first sound of the singing Militar}- Chaplain Hermann Falk turned wrathfully in his bed, grumbling that since it was by no means the ninth hour of the day, Trossel should have looked better 5 The Men of the Mountain after his "rascaldom of Pomeranians." But the moment afterwards something familiar came through the coverlet which was drawn about the ears of the Chaplain of the Grenadiers. It seemed suddenly as if he were in a far city. It was the winter season. The black tangled streets were slippery and crisp with snow. The pents of the houses discharged rumbles of half-melted snow on his head. Strange, too, how clearly he saw the wide, bleak courtyard of the old college, the broad steps which led to the assembly hall, the groups about the fire in the dining hall — seniors they mostly — and at the opening of the morning class the voices of men — of many }-oung men — singing the Luther's hymn of Scotland. He too had passed that way, and the ancient melody had grown part of him — so much so that his grenadiers, smiling all across their broad Pomeranian faces, were wont to say, " There goes Old Head-and- Shoulders at his Scots again ! Best look to your cartridges, lads ! There will be warm work close ahead of us, I wager ! " The Military Chaplain leaped from his bed, rapidly passed his cloak of office about him, and was out in the street before David Alix had finished his psalm. Chaplain Falk made a strange figure in the clearness of an Alpine morning — his rough shock of uncombed locks, all cow-licks and rebellious tufts, his black- braided trousers only half covered by the fluttering Genevan gown in which he had, the evening before, read the service for the troops to whom it was his duty to speak of God and Fatherland. " Be still and knozv that I am God J " — so came the 6 HIS HANDS WERE WIDE APART AND MADE THE SHAPE OE A CROSS, FOR HIS TIME WAS SHORT. The Shadow on the Wall words to his ears. He saw the French pastor now, standing a yard or so in front of the wall. His hands were wide apart, and made the shape of a cross on the whitewashed wall behind him, for his time was short. Soon, very soon, would he know who indeed was God. For Von Hartmann, who, like the stout old Gallio that he was, cared for none of these things, had just given the command to "take aim." Into the six yards between \h& peloton of execution and the Man-about-to-Die, Military Chaplain Hermann Falk precipitated himself with a rush and a flutter of ecclesiastical silk. " Ground arms ! " he commanded, under the very moustache of the astonished General. " For a pin's head," growled fierce old Von Hart- mann, " I would stick you up beside him ! Men, do your duty ! " " Shoot, rascals, if }-ou dare ! " cried the Chaplain, standing close in front of David Alix, and with a dexterous cast, enveloping -him in the ample folds oi his Neurenberg gown. " I dare you," he cried. " Even in this world you dare not shoot down the King's own chaplain — and his Majesty thanking God every day for the assistance of the God of battles ! As for your own future chances, they could not well be worse, considering the set of Wendish heathens that you are ! But I excommunicate for ever any man who moves, till I have spoken with this singer of the songs of Zion ! If I mistake not he is an old friend of mine." Perhaps it vA'ould not have succeeded with any other corps than the Second Pomeranians. But they had The Men of the Mountain heard the roar of the Baltic. They had seen the white horses ride past Isle Rugen, and as to old Von Hartmann, the name of King William daunted him as nothing else on earth could. So, smothering a hearty curse at the Chaplain's untimely interference, but recognising that for the moment he had better give in with what air of grace was possible to him, he growled out, "Well, Herr Regimental Chaplain, since you care so little for the Hves of your parishioners as to let them be shot down by rascals such as this, let us see what your reverend wisdom will make of him ! " " Aye, and gladly, Major-General," answered Falk, shaking his rugged head. " But first call off these good fellows, who are weary with so long holding their needle-guns at the ' present,' and give me your word that you will do nothing against this man without a proper trial." " There is no more time for that," grumbled the commander ; " speak to him — let us hear what he has to say ! You and I know each other — we will judge the case together — old Saul-among-the-People ! " And by that all the command knew that the General had improved vastly in humour, and that, unless his mood changed again, the Frenchman stood reprieved. " Where is the evidence of his guilt .'' " demanded Chaplain Falk. " Sergeant-Major Schram, what was found upon him } " " That, and that ! " said the automaton, indicating the pieces of conviction, spread out on the ground, with the point of his boot. 8 The Shadow on the Wall " Bread, a paper, and a Bible ! You would shoot a man for that — heathens, Wends, idolaters, witch- folk ! Does a man come out to kill or to give life, tlius armed ? See, you — you fools ! Bread for the body, the Word of God for the soul ! And the paper ! Let us see, let us see ! Written in English, is it ? Well, I was not three years in Edinburgh College for nothing ! " And this is what he read out in the clear high tones which he used at the evening prayer, when all the men stood with bowed and uncovered heads : "List of poor widows and sick folk in the commune of Mouthe to whom bread is to be taken First, Madame Gilberte, Mas des Marais. Second, old Jean Drujon, at the Pont du Doubs.** And so on to the bottom. He did not spare them one single name, and at the end he took the hand of Pastor David Alix, true shepherd of his flock, and crying aloud, " Now shoot him if you dare ! " he strode off to his lodging with his new-recovered friend. He did not so much as glance at the General, who sat his horse, smiling a little, and gnawing his grey moustache. He only cried out to the sergeant-major : " Schram, bring the bread to my room. I am a little short this morning, myself! My friend David will perhaps add me to his list of the hungry and the needy in this commune of Mouthe 1 " CHAPTER II. THE MILITARY CHAPLAIN HERMANN FALK of Isle Rugen, late chaplain in the Altkirch of Berlin, and sometime student at the Edinburgh College-on-the-Mound, conveyed his former friend and con-disciple to his lodging, where at the door his landlady, Madame Virginie, angular and gaunt, awaited with more than her natural disfavour the return of her particular barbarian. But when she saw behind her guest the tall figure of Pastor David Alix, Madame Virginie sank quickly upon one knee. She had dwelt all her life among Roman Catholics. So, though a Protestant, she would gladly have kissed the hand of her minister, and asked for his blessing. Specially now was his fame of good odour among all mothers of families in the commune of Mouthe, because Madame, his mother, out of her scanty store, the provision she had made for the winter and spring, was supplying half the population of the war-swept communes, from Mouthe to Le Lochle, with the bread which is the ultimate staff of life. The Germans had done their best. No war, on the whole, had ever been more cleanly conducted, but an lo The Military Chaplain army must find provision as the first necessity of its being. Moreover, Bourbaki's army had been over the ground before, and what the locusts of France had spared, it was now the turn of the German canker- worm to eat. Even on the Swiss side the folk of the Jura were in a great trouble, and the distress would have been far worse but for David Alix and his mother. Madame Alix was called " the Old," not because she was old in years or that her natural strength had abated, but in anticipation of David's taking to himself a wife. She was a forceful, em- phatic, face-to-the-foe woman, full of quick angers and as sudden contritions. It was to the produce of her fine farm, just over the frontier of Switzerland, that the Upper Valley of the Doubs owed its escape from starvation. And among these one of the most grateful was Madame Virginie Granier of Mouthe, at present the unwilling hostess of the heathen man who called himself a pastor, and yet without shame smoked a long pipe in bed ! It was no wonder then that "Virginie Granier, the mother of six children and the protector of an invalid husband, sank on her knees before Pastor Alix — though, be it said, perhaps as much for the sake of his mother's loaves of good wheaten bread, her oil, and her wine, as because of his sacred office and renown as a preacher. But David Alix, used to such homage, simply raised one hand in the air, and in the apostolic manner called for a blessing to be upon that house. He did it so reverently that his companion turned upon him with a twinkle. II The Men of the Mountain " Friend David," he said, " you would never do foi an army chaplain. I have to bully my Pomeranians to make them move one step heavenward, and even so, it is mostly with kicks that I can convince them, the raw-boned Baltic mules that they are ! " " Then," said David, smiling, " if I understand you, they do not, like new-born babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word ? " " Beer suits them better," cried the Military Chap- lain, " The rascals would sell their Wendish souls for beer, and now they are in the vilest of tempers because they cannot get it." He thought a moment, and then added, with a quick flash of the eye, " And you, my David, came near to suffering martyrdom all for that ! John the Baptist because of Salome, Stephen because of the libertines, your own Calvinist folk because they thought differ- ently from emperor and king ! But you — merely because old Von Hartmann and Trossel had been three weeks without beer ! " They went up into the sleeping- room of the Chap- lain, where the bed-clothes lay just where he had tossed them when he heard the noise of the psalm- singing without. The sergeant followed with the bread and a request from the colonel that if one or two small loaves could be spared for the mess, the officers would be grateful. " If they had shot you, they would have had them all, the pigs ! " cried their chaplain ; " but take them th'ese three with the compliments of my friend. Pastor David Alix, of Geneva! Mind you say 'of Geneva.' " 12 ^«^^^V^^^,^v,, HE DID IT SO REVERENTLY THAT HIS COMPAXK)X TIKXED ll'UX HIM WITH A TWIXKLE. The Military Chaplain " Better say ' of his mother,' " said the son with humihty. "Aye, say — with the compHments of the woman whom, but for their chaplain, they would have made childless ! The instinct is good. That may perhaps touch them if anything will, hogs of the sty ! " Sergeant-Major Schram touched his cap woodenly, brought his heels together with a sharp click, and demanded, " Am I to call the gentlemen these names to their face ? " " Certainly, and with my compliments ! Say that I, Army Chaplain Hermann Falk, stand ready to prove my words. I was not five years viaitre cV amies in my time for nothing. ' Hogs of the sty ' — re- member, Schram — that is, if no private is within hearing ! " Sergeant Schram saluted grimly, and went out with his usual wooden click of boot heels. Needless to say, he understood his stormy chaplain excellently, and had not the least intention of risking his stripes by delivering any such message. But to the colonel he simply said, in delivering the loaves, " With the com- pliments of the mother of Pastor David Alix, late of Geneva, and a college comrade of Herr Chaplain Falk ! " At this the officers looked at each other rather shamefacedly. Here were the coals of fire with a vengeance. But they were genuinely grateful for the loaves. The country had been swept clean of every- thing eatable, and, worse still in the estimation *of these thirsty-throated Wends, of everything drinkable. Each glided his hand into his pocket, and scribbling 13 The Men of the Mountain hastily a card of thanks, gave it to Schram to carry back to their late prisoner and present benefactor. Then they looked at one another, and Colonel Trossel said, smiling grimly, " This Colberg regiment will hear some good plain-spoken German next sermon time, I will wager." His subordinates nodded their heads, and seemed to relish the prospect but little. But their chief comforted them. " Never mind, lads ; after all, he is one of us, and anything he can say to us will be babe's sweetstuff to what he gave old Von Hartmann in the face of the whole regiment." They laughed discreetly, because it affected their superior officer and divisional general. But they laid away the dressing-down Hartmann had got from Old- Head-and-Shoulders deep in their hearts, to be re- counted when, in far-off Rugen or Pommern, they fought their battles over again. His sudden irruption, his intervention, as brusque and even brutal as it had been successful, his saving of their pastor's life, caused the Chaplain to rise high in the estimation of the few inhabitants, mostly women, who still remained in the village of Mouthe on the Upper Doubs. The men were at the war — the younger in the line or shut up in Germany, a few in Paris. The elders, fathers of families and ancient braves of the war of Italy and of the Crimea, were " Moblots," training, marching, and fighting with the best, but as regularly going down before the disciplined soldiership of their foes. What better could they do .? From the beginning hardly a gleam of hope, much less of victory, had 14 The Military Chaplain cheered them. They were hopeless and starving Yet they fought on — nay, would have continued to ficfht, even when their chiefs knew that the hour for surrender had struck. As for the younger men and growing boys of the hill district occupied by the Germans during these last days of the war, it was not a safe question to ask con- cerning them. Mostly a rusty rifle of some antique and forgotten pattern had disappeared at the time when Jean or Louis, or the schoolboy Henri (as they say in Corsica), " took to the makis." The wilderness had swallowed them up. But none the less, there would come a scratch with a finger-nail at the window when all was safe and still. In a minute or two the door at the back would yawn slightly, mother or sister standing with palpitating hearts behind it. Then, with socks drawn over his boots the franc- tireur would slip in, a desperate and romantic prodigal, to be fed and wept over with smothered sobs. Mostly, however, the Germans now kept such good watch that entrance into the villages was seldom attempted. Provisions had therefore to be smuggled out, and the bearer of aid to the " bush-whacker " was liable to share the same fate as these unlicensed sharpshooters, whose crime was that they wore no uniform and made war each on his own private account against the invaders of his country. Well-nigh had David Alix shared this fate, though he had done nothing, except lay aside for a time his office that he might serve tables. Madame Virginie Granier brought out of her secret 15 The Men of the Mountain hoards such a breakfast as no German in the Juras had seen for months — an omelette made with eggs laid away in cinders, toasted bread fried with bacon and chips of potatoes — precious beyond gold — sausages, white bread, and a bottle of .excellent Burgundy. Madame Virginie bustled about and en- joyed her triumph. The six children peeped shyly out of corners, or were stepped upon — and cuffed — as their mother hurried to and fro with the dishes. " I suppose," said the Chaplain of the Colberg Grenadiers, " that you have not this good and well- provided lady on your list of poor to be assisted .'' " They were speaking in English, to which, in memory of old times, they had reverted instinctively as a means of communication — also, perhaps, that there might be no danger of their being overheard. For answer David Alix threw the paper across to his ancient friend and fellow-student of the Mound. The name of Madame Virginie Granier stood high on the list. The Military Chaplain looked his astonishment. " I am speaking now to my ancient comrade, not to a German officer ! " said David Alix, with one of his rare sweet smiles. " These are the secrets of the prison house. That in which you have shut us up," David explained. "This food we are eating is Madame Virginie's last reserve — the ban and arrihe ban of her hidden stores. She has six children to feed. There is no work in the country. The fields have long ago been swept clear of grain, chiefly for fodder for the cavalry horses. As for these things," he added, as he toyed with his fork — with its fellow in the hands of i6 The Military Chaplain the Military Chaplain, the pride of the house and unequalled in all Mouthe — " I warrant that the hen which laid these eggs cackled on my mother's farm at Chaumont, just across the frontier yonder. And the sausage, the preserved meats — all save perhaps the wine, came from Switzerland by my mother's private underground railway." " Which, I presume, means you, Master David ? " asked the Military Chaplain with a flavour of his ordinary roughness. The gentle pastor of Geneva shook his head. " No," he said. " I am only the open dispenser of daily bread. It is my mother whose deeds are those of a secret and mysterious providence. You do not know my mother. You must come and see her." " Heaven and the bones of Charlemagne forbid ! " cried the Chaplain of the Colberg Grenadiers. "What! And bring Von Bergmann and all the hordes of the Baltic down upon you ! " " It matters but little to my mother here. She lives across the frontier. In France she has no more than a few kilos of wheaten flour ready to mix with the maize for to-morrow's loaves. They are fresh, my mother's ' gendarmes' hats ' — as they call the little round loaves here — but also the stomachs are so famine-ridden that a doctor could not find one case of indigestion in a twelvemonth." " Aha," quoth the Chaplain, and inclined his ear, smiling kindly, "a wise woman, the lady your mother! She knows the value of an advanced post, right in the middle of affairs, but her headquarters is under the protection of another power." 17 C The Men of the Mountain " Of all the powers," said the Pastor of the Jura, gently triumphant, " the King of Prussia included." The Military Chaplain raised his glass, as at a toast, when the name of his King fell from the Pastor's lips. " Your mother grows such wine as this " he said, perhaps to change the subject, " and yet you drink only water." " I am no man to dictate to another," the Pastor answered. " For me, I was brought up in a country where every peasant has his little vineyard, as in the Bible, and no man is the worse for it. But I make the slight sacrifice to my office, and I am content." The Military Chaplain shook his head at him reproachfully. *' Take care, David," he said ; " this water-drinking is a habit which, if not checked in time, may grow upon you. How can you tell where it will end ? Think well, my David ! I am sure from your looks that I have an ally in your mother. Come now, how often has she quoted to you that text which relates to the state of Timothy's stomach .' " "Till I am sick of hearing it," said the Pastor, laughing. " Aha, good David, have I so nearly hit the mark ? Your mother pleases me. She has more sense of the needs of men than you, her only son. How would it be with you, think you, if you were made Military Chaplain of Colberg's Regiment .-• And where would your influence be with these wild Wends of mine if you were afraid of an honest chopine of the red, or to take down in your turn, as it is served out, a mug i8 The Military Chaplain of the right Stettin brew, laced with schnapps to keep out the cold ? " David put out his hand to touch his friend's. He felt that it was not the time for discussion, even con- cerning Timothy's stomach, with the man who, a bare hour ago, had saved his life. " Your Switzer was ever a lusty drinker," the Military Chaplain continued, unwilling to have the dispute thus closed — for like all his kind he loved the friendly strife of tongues. David Alix smiled a little sadly, and then said, " I am no more a Swiss. I have been naturalised a Frenchman for a good half-dozen years." At this declaration the Chaplain of Trossel's Col- bergers turned pale even under his full coating of tan. " Then, lad," he said, " a while ago you were nearer finding out all about it from Timothy himself than if you had fought twenty pitched battles. But what a great lie I told the General. If he had known you were no Switzer, I doubt not that old Von Hartmann would have plastered us both to the wall with a score of rifle bullets through our vitals. Aye, and may yet, unless your conscience is more pliable on the matter of Ananias than on that of Paul and Timothy ! " " I can be silent with any man ! " said the Pastor. And at that moment there came the heavy pounding of gun-butts upon the door which Madame Virginie had prudently closed during the repast of these two reverend men, her guests. " Open there— open, Herr Chaplain ! " cried a voice in rough German of the utmost North — " General's orders ! " 19 2 c The Men of the Mountain " Hang him up in his own sword-belt — let him wait, David. I forbid you to open the door ! " The Military Chaplain was very busy doing some very rapid and intricate conjuring. David Alix, who naturally did not understand the German into which his guest had relapsed, threw open the door. Half-a- dozen officers of the staff precipitated themselves into the room, laughing and crying out, " Aha, we have scented you out, old fox ! You palm off dry bread on us, and villainously little of that ! And we find you feeding with this Genevan 'Pfafif'! Here are some of the loaves left. Break one open, and I will wager we shall find a roast duck or a bottle of wine snug within. The Colbergers have told us tales of their chaplain." " So," cried Hermann Falk. " Well, you will hear other tales as soon as I have seen the King — breaking in thus upon one whom his Majesty has deigned to call his friend — aye, even in despatches to the well- beloved, nobly-born Queen!" Meanwhile David Alix, returned from the door, had been gazing at the table in amazement. Not only had the bottle of wine been removed, but every vestige of the repast, even the rest of the bacon and sausage. Only a few crumbs of bread appeared beside each plate, and the baffled raiders had to retire ill-contented under a galling cross-fire of scoffs from the Chaplain. " Perhaps it is the other, the Genevan. Smell his breath. Hertz ! " called out Von Tiimpling of the Guards, whose father was a general in the Crown Prince's army. " Useless, my good friends, he is a Calvinist and 20 '^■^^w,,,, ' AHA, WE HAVE SCENTED YOU OUT, OLD FOX .- I The Military Chaplain drinks only water ! Come, my pretty lads," continued the fighting Chaplain of the Grenadiers — " come one at a time and smell my breath — if you dare ! I warrant you it will be the last thing any one of you will care to smell for a long time ! " "He learned the English 'boxing' instead of his Hebrew verbs when he was so long across the water ! It is that which makes him so bold ! " cried Von Tiimpling. " And good reason therefore, since his Majesty was minded to make me chaplain of a set of Wendish wolves, with scented Bavarian jack-a-dandies buzzing about like cockchafers where they are least wanted ! Good day to you and a good appetite. I shall bear your visit in pleasing memory when next I write to the King ! " 21 CHAPTER III. LA PETITE FLORE IN a high chamber, simply furnished, La Petite Flore was having her feet washed by a girl still younger than herself. La Petite Flore was so called because, once on a time (and a long time ago) she had been less tall than her mother, the " Grande Flore " of Les Collines. But meantime La Petite had grown great, had sought instruction, had found it, had even passed the Rhine, and lived seven years in Germany as a teacher of her native language. It chanced that there she had fallen among a people rough and difficult, rather than unkindly. So at the first news of the disasters that had befallen her province, she had returned, nominally to engage as a nurse in the military hospitals, but really to join the first bands of franc-tireiirs, sabre by her side and chassepot in hand. These were now laid on the bed in the corner, and Noelie, the daughter of the house at Villars Chaumont, above Berets in Canton Neuchatel, kneeled charmingly before her friend, listening to her story, and with light caressing touches of her finger-tips restoring elasticity to the wearied muscles. All her command had been 22 La Petite Flore thrown back upon Switzerland. The "riflemen of Laroche " had been nnomentarily broken up, and with them their one famous rifle-woman, Heutenant in a corps which had seen a good deal of irregular fighting, but had never been allowed to join issue with the enemy in the company of troops of the line. Accord- ingly, as was natural, a good deal of hedge-firing, followed by rapid retreats, had made up the record of the first Laroche company oi franc-tireiirs. After La Petite Flore had unbuckled her belt, and laid her pro- vision of cartridges carefully on a shelf, she threw her- self on Noelie Villars' bed, eating and talking at once, glad to be with one of her own sex. " How do you like the war .'' " said the younger, sitting down by her on the edge of the mattress, and curling up her feet under her to listen comfortably. " War," said the Little Flore, between two bites of toasted bread dipped in milk, "is war. There is nothing worse in the world. There can be nothing worse. You are happy to live here across the frontier, in a land where none can molest you or yours." " But you are safe now ! " cried Noelie, with a quick gasp of tenderness, and clasping her friend in her arms. La Petite Flore looked at the young girl with pity and shook her head. " I am indeed here with you and safe for the moment, but there are my people over yonder — at Les CoUines. Both my father Frangois and Louis Marie, my brother, have been 'out.' Who knows what may be the issue .-' They made me first lieu- tenant and I have acted as captain of my company. 23 The Men of the Mountain But in spite of all I could neither put spirit into our leaders, keep the men from plundering their own people, or shooting stray Germans in the back. This I do not call patriotism — at least, I have not come to that yet. But then, Noelie, I have not yet suffered in my person or my family. As I have read of the Scots, we of the Franche Comte do never fight in earnest till we have seen our own blood flowing red ! " And, in fact, our chiefs did not wish, so far as I could see, to come to blows with the enemy. We marched and counter-marched — here, there, and every- where, but upon me it had only the effect of so many tourists on promenade. " Not one of our officers understood anything about what they had to do.^ Our colonel was paralysed in his legs and followed the company by little stages in a cab. One night we had news that forty Uhlans were coming to Baccarat to make a requisition. We were then at St. Die, nearly three thousand men of us. But our colonel, our general staff, and the very adjutant himself had forgotten to take the address of the lodgings of the buglers. So, thanks to this negli- gence, it took from one in the morning till five to get together a company of sixty-five men ! At last we started, two hundred and fifteen men, in requisitioned vehicles, to catch the forty fast-riding raiders upon ' All this seems so impossible that I am obliged to refer to the report of Mademoiselle Marie Antoinette Lix, pp. 191-203 of Le Livre cTOr des Femmes de France (Paris, F. Polo, 1872), which contains the exact experiences of Lieutenant Marie Lix during the war. 24 La Petite Flore Baccarat. I, a mere girl, was quivering ^^■ith im- patience and anger before we started. At last we got under weigh. There were in the dog-cart of a neighbouring proprietor, three captains of the Free Companies of the Jura, two soldiers of 'Ours,' and myself The Laroche and Jura men followed in other vehicles. It was like an Easter Monday trip of employes. " To crown all, three officers began, while we were yet on the road, to speak of stopping for lunch at Raon-l'Etape. I looked at them at first, and indeed laughed a little, thinking it was a bad joke. Then, seeing them serious and inclined to discuss the possible menu, I said, ' Gentlemen, if you take lunch the Uhlans will certainly be informed of your coming, and will mock bravely at us ! '" " They answered that it could not be expected that soldiers would march or fight if they had nothing for lunch. I was inclined to say that so far as I had seen we had done but little of either. We arrived at Raon at seven, and as nothing more had been said I began to hope that my advice had been taken. But, in spite of all, lunch was ordered. At ten we were still at table, when news came from Baccarat that we need not hurry ourselves. The forty Uhlans had arrived there to the minute, had levied their contributions at their ease, were now quietly on their way back, and would soon be within their own lines. I declare that I cried for anger and shame. After this escapade my superior officers dared not go back to St. Die that night, but took up a position in a wood not far from our break- fasting-place ! The two soldiers who had been with 25 The Men of the Mountain us in the dog-cart told their comrades how I had insisted that there should be no halt at Raon, but that we should go straight on to entrap the Uhlans at Baccarat. The soldiers were furious, and would have named me captain by acclamation. But I warned them that if there were the least manifestation on my account in the company, I would instantly resign. This made them hold their tongues. But some were so discouraged that they would not carry their knapsacks. So I took one from the shoulders of a six-foot giant, and carried it on my own till the end of the day. I refused to sup with the well-provisioned officers, but ate black bread with the soldiers. Nevertheless, several refused to mount guard, whereupon I said that if they were frightened, I would stand guard for them. The next day we returned to St. Die, where my friends received me as one for ever lost. But I explained to them that all who wished to live long and obtain free picnics at the expense of the Government ought to join our corps under its new name of ' The Long Life Assurance Company of Laroche,' which I had given it. " Our commander on this occasion was Captain Duval. He had somewhat the air of a sergeant-major with a pension, and his breast was one panoply of medals, half of them (whispered his orderly) gained at different exhibitions as a manufacturer of walking- sticks, while the other half recorded his triumphs in long-distance swimming. He travelled light, all his furniture and provisions following him in two enormous vans, while he himself caried only a noble gourd filled with old ' kirsch,' which naturally became emptier as the miles grew in number. 26 La Petite Flore " To such a man the fate of six hundred men was committed. He would start bravely at the head of his column, shout windy commands as long as it was day, and going through towns he would look martial enough. But while the rest of us carried our entire campaigning outfit on our backs — sack, thirty-five pounds ; chassepol, eleven ; together with sabre and revolver — the Captain Duval carried only one of his own walking-canes, and the famous gourd, the weight of which reduced as we advance. But when, after dark, his officers, I among the number, asked the commandant whither we were going, he looked in- dignantly at us, took a pull at the gourd, and replied — which was true enough — that that was his business and not ours ! But I, at least, was not afraid of any loner-distance cane-maker in the world. So I asked him before all the others, ' Captain, will we be long in arriving before the enemy ? ' " ' Faith, I know no more about it than you do,' the brave Captain answered in a voice which proved that the gourd was by no means so full as it had been. " ' Have you, then, taken guides from among the peasants } ' I continued. ' For without them we are sure to get lost among this maze of cross- roads.' " ' Guides, lieutenant,' said he — ' what guides ? I never take any ! ' " ' Then, Captain, you must know the country like the palm of your hand .'' ' " ' I have never set foot in it before. Look here, once for all. Lieutenant, a good general has no need 27 The Men of the Mountain of guides. He marches straight forward till he finds the Prussians. Then he thrashes them ! Voild ! ' "Thus did Captain Duval disclose his plan of battle," concluded the girl lieutenant, " so simple and surprising that I dropped at once to the rear. It is no use arguing with a gallon of old ' kirsch.' " 28 CHAPTER IV. COUNCIL OF REVISION MEANWHILE in far Provence, near a sunburnt hill called the Mountain of St. Gabriel, in a part of France quite untouched by the hand of war, where never the boldest Uhlan had pushed a reconnaissance, the officers of the new Government were drawing the last " lot," raising their final levy, as in the days when the first Napoleon took the children from the hoop and spinning-top to replace that Grande Armee, crumbled into ruin from Moscow to the Niemen. But the last call of Republican Mobiles made by Gambetta and Freycinet had much of that humour in it which lies on the frontier of tears. For days before smart officers of the staff" and yet smarter sergeants had pervaded the white streets of St. Gabriel, clinked spurs along the Grande Cours where the nou-noos walk with their babies, and the eternally unemployed of the south manage to do nothing all day — and keep a household on the proceeds. Now, of course, nothing was talked about in St. Gabriel but the war, the infamy of Prussia, and what surprises would be reserved for Von Moltke and Bismarck if they dared to cross the Durance and 29 l~^ The Men of the Mountain appear at the gates of St. Gabriel. Already all that was really most gallant and patriotic in the little town with its red-baked roofs and dusty streets had long ago marched away among the first volunteers, or were in their places in the regiments of the line — or mayhap, in their quiet, unknown graves. The rest had stopped on where they were — and talked. Ah, how they had talked — and threatened .... in the Cafe du Camargue and that of " Le Brave Henri." Especially in the latter had the white plumes shone. Companies had been formed, ofificers chosen, watches set. But somehow the first wet night brought them all in, oflficers and men alike, to the long bright room of " Le Brave Henri," where the landlord smiled and rubbed his hands as they stacked their rifles in the corner. Here, at least, was a moment of repose from the storms of war, while the wet and unhurt " Leaguers of the Midi " sat with a mounting pillar of little saucers before each of them, and destroyed alternatively the Crown Prince and Manteuffel, or Von Moltke and the Red Frederic, till not an invader was left on the sacred soil of the fatherland. On late nights, when hope and picqicette ran high, it was solemnly disputed whether " the Republic " should be content with the Rhine, from Swiss-glacier to Hollander-dyke for a boundary, or whether they should demand also the Rhine provinces, and at last finish with the Minster of Cologne, with a tricolour tied to its weathercock. Strangely enough, the news of the morning might be ever so discouraging, the day lamentably long drawn out and filled only with yawns and strategic marches to the nearest hamlet, but the evening in 30 Council of Revision " Le Brave Henri " chased all fears away, and Moltke and Manteuffel were once more trodden under foot. But this last conscription, which certain good gentle- men in Tours and Bordeaux called the levy e7i masse, was on the face of it something infinitely more serious. For one thing, the business of the draft was administra- tive, and every Frenchman, however much he may hate the Government of his country, has an instinctive respect for the administration thereof. At the mouldy, dust-powdered door of the Mairie, peasants too old for the conscription stood about with their eyes on their Auguste or Jean Marie — who, like their Napoleonic predecessors, would gladly have be- taken themselves to the sweetshops and stalls aligned along the market-place. But within the Mairie the scene was solemn enough. The authorities were in session. The new Prefect, sent like a parcel from Paris by the Government on the 4th September, was a journalist who had once had the good fortune to be imprisoned under the Empire. Thus under the Re- public his fortune was as good as made. At first he had been ill received among the aristocracy of the south, royalist to the core. But since universal con- scription had been ordered, many fathers of families and not a few mothers had called upon him. With him were the Mayor of St. Gabriel, and a general on the retired list, but now temporarily commanding the subdivision. Two local doctors sat on chairs a little apart, each with a scared look, knowing well that their best-paying patients would consider them mere mur- derers if their sons were sent to the War in the East, as it was called in Provence. 31 The Men of the Mountain Now the Prefect was as ready with the spoken word as with the pen. Indeed, he had ahvays some catchword with which he bored his audiences. People who had suffered most often declared that these were the titles of his ancient leading articles, and that what followed was only the article itself warmed up a little. But the young spur-clanking officers retired discreetly into the corridor at the first sign of a prefectorial speech. The Mayor went to sleep in his comfortable chair. The General looked over sheaves of papers that rustled. Only the faithful gendarmes stood with eyes fixed at attention, ready to suffer for their country. And accordingly it was to them that the Prefect addressed himself. His present phrase was " the Idea of the Government " in instituting military service, universal and compulsor}', for vague bands oi franc-tireiirs. " The millionaire's son," he affirmed, " shall march side by side with the son of the mountain shepherd, the heir of the great manufacturer sleep in the next cot to one of his own workmen. This is the Idea of the Government ! " " It is five minutes to twelve," said the General abruptly, ceasing for a moment the rustling of his papers in order to pull out his watch. " It \s my duty to explain," said the Prefect — " I may say it is at once my duty and my privilege. The Government expects it of me." Fuming, the General thrust out his legs and glanced enviously at the slumbering Mayor, who could be so much at ease in the Municipal Palace of St. Gabriel. " There are a lot of eggs in this basket," he grumbled. 32 'THIS IS THE IDEA OF THE GOVERNMENT !' Council of Revision " Why not get the conscripts together, and then let a man get out of this harness ! " The Prefect took no notice, but opened his flood- gates yet wider. The gendarmes nerved themselves to a longer spell of expressionless immobility, and in the antechamber some fifty young men, lightly clad for the ordeal, shivered and played off mirthless jokes which not even the jester pretended to enjoy. " The Idea of the Government is a noble one," the Prefect went on ; " the scion of a noble race, the untaught labourer, the charcoal-burner from far forests, the miner with the dust of the pit upon him " " In my command he shall have a bath," growled the General, " if I have to soap him myself" " It is the Idea of the Government," the unwearied Prefect went on ; " no one shall be exempt. This is the new and perfect Republic. All shall be equal. The time shall be " " Twelve o'clock ! Call in Number One," interrupted the General, who could stand this no more. The Mayor awaked, looked about him to make sure he was not in bed, perceived his robes, and in his turn began to address the audience. "Gentlemen of the municipality," he said pompously. But with him the General-commanding stood on no ceremony, because in his private capacity the Mayor was Government contractor for boots to the sub- division. "Hold your tongue!" he said brusquely, "one speaking at a time is enough. This is military business, after all." Number One advanced with a modest assurance, 33 D The Men of the Mountain confident in his powerful protectors. The Mayor, who had never assisted at a Council of Revision before, checked himself in the act of ordering Numbef One into custody for daring to appear in the Mairie in a dress so primitive. But the General cut him short. " Your name, age, and rank } " said the General to Number One. " In the true Republic," exclaimed the Prefect, " there are no ranks." " There are in the army ! " shouted the General, glowering fiercely at the civil authority. The Prefect, refusing to be put down, repeated several times that it was the Idea of the Government. " Joseph-John-Marie de Boulbon," answered the j^oung man, after they had settled their quarrel. The Prefect leaned towards the ear of the General and whispered, " His father is a friend of mine — called upon me last week — his support important, most important to the Government." The General nodded with the air of one who knew all about it. " I am interested in Number Six," he said, con- sulting the list before him. " Exempt ! " said the Prefect, and with no more delay than putting on his clothes. Number One was restored to the bosom of an anxious family waiting outside. Then, during the consideration of the next four cases, nothing material happened. They were common lads enough, some of them sons of widows, others with weak chests, ready to be nipped in the first frost of the campaign — but in any case good enough to fill the ranks of the Mobiles. They had no 34 Council of Revision friends at court. Their stammered explanations were not attended to. The entire Council of Revision seemed to be suddenly stricken deaf when one of them spoke. But the General's friend, Number Six, found deficient in eyesight, was immediately exempted. So was Number Seven, the nephew of the Mayor, though the champion athlete of the town. Then Number Eight told how his father and brother had been killed, one at Worth and one at Saint Privat Much against his will he must stay with his mother and take care ol the ewes during the lambing season. After that he would gladly volunteer. " Good for the service ! " pronounced the Prefect of the Republic of fraternity and equality, adding for the fiftieth time that this was the Idea of the Government. Thus, and not otherwise, did the impartial Council of Revision of the town of St. Gabriel perform its delicate functions and manfully carry through its task.'^ Among those who asked for no exemption and declared no infirmity was a young man upon whose erect carriage even the General cast a look of favour, while the officer of recruitment jotted him down in his book as possessing " the makings of a smart colour- sergeant." His name was Ludovic Villars, and he was the son of a banker and money-lender who, so diey said, had long ago fled the country to escape a dis- graceful failure. Ludovic had been brought up by his maternal aunt, a verj' respectable woman who took in washing. But he had educated himself in the schools of St. Gabriel, at the college at Montpellier, * Vide L. Pichon, Le loi Moblots, Paris, 1874. 35 D 2 The Men of the Mountain hoping one day to make himself a member of the bar and advocate of the courts. But out of session and in his own country he worked at the trade which he had learned in order to use as one uses a tool. He became a plumber — a trade which, in St. Gabriel, is chiefly conducted on the crumbling roofs of tiled houses with every hair and tag of clothing blown out stiffly southward by the mighty winds of the Rhone Valley. But at Montpellier he was Ludovic Villars, student and bursar of the faculty of law in the university of that learned city. 3^ CHAPTER V. JONATHAN AND HIS DAVID IN a day or two after the adventure of David Alix and the MiUtary Chaplain, it happened that the forces of Von Hartmann, checked in their southward movement, turned northward, with the purpose of sweeping the two mountain departments of the Doubs and the Jura clear of " bush-whackers," as also of the lingering debris of Bourbaki's broken army of the south-east, now safely refuged in Switzerland. The Germans opened out a very wide front. Uhlans and lancers scouring the plains and valleys, while with patient assiduity the slower-footed infantry searched every clump and drew each copse and forest. Soldiers in uniform, assumed to have formed part of Bourbaki's command, were directed upon Germany. But even so, the numbers of the regiments were care- fully compared with the known rolls of the French armies which had surrendered to the Swiss colonels. If a man were wounded he was required to undergo an examination as to when and where he had received his hurt. If the wound appeared too fresh, or the unfortunate was unable to show his livret militaire, his chances of being treated to the sharp shrift 37 SU The Men of the Mountain accorded to the unlicensed franc-tireur were greatly increased. But for all that, the deaths among German sentries, " gallopers," and baggage escorts rather increased than diminished, as the battalions turned their faces in the direction of Belfort, still gallantly holding out. Along the edges of that gloomy lake of St. Point, from which pours the infant Doubs, dead men were lying, each with his own piece of rock behind him chipped and battered by the hail of bullets, of which he had received the necessary quota in heart and brain. These, however, were the solitary fighters, each for his own hand, and they had died singly, promptly, with their faces to the foe whom, ever since they had buckled on the cartridge-belt, they had waited and manoeuvred to slay. Marching through the gorge of La Cluse and along the Swiss frontier, the battalions of Von Hartmann swept both sides of the Doubs water as far as Morteau. They encamped finally at the bend of the river, where it first becomes the boundary between France and the Confederation, As clear as ever the German bugles sounded, throwing out, as it were mechanically, this way and that, the units of the wondrous war machine. The white shelter tents went up on the barer spots. Beneath, the Lake of Brenets had kept open its deep green waters shadowed by the pines thickly ranged along the sides of the steep gorge of the Doubs. Three miles away they could hear the dull sough of the Falls of the Doubs, while just beneath rose the steep roofs of the village where the General and his staff were already installed. Jonathan and his David And David, to whom all this country had been familiar since infancy, pointed south across the pine- filled valley of the Doubs to where, on the Swiss slopes, a house smoked hospitably and kindly. It was a large building with many outhouses, half stock- farm, half chateau. " My mother's house — the farm of Villars Chaumont," he explained. " In our country we should call it a chateau if it were only half that size," said the Military Chaplain, into whose care David Alix had been committed. " Now at last it is clear to me why you were always so spoiled in the matter of lodgings when v/e were at the College-on-the-Mound. You were rich and never told us." '' You are wrong," David answered gently, with the curious compelling quiet in his voice which made belief by no means a matter of choice. " All tJtat belongs to my mother as the heir of my step-father. But I shall nev'er touch a copper nor call a stone of it my own." " These be most noble sentiments, my David," said the Chaplain, " and do you credit. But as in my old age, when a grateful country retires me with a pension of two silver marks a day, I mean to come and spend the evening of my life ' sitting under you,' as they used to say in Scotland, do not, I beg of you, let any such quixotry stand between me and my little comforts ! " " It is no quixotry," David Alix went on ; " though I am the only son of my mother, I am not her only child — for which I thank God, as you will also, my friend, when you see my half-sister Noelie ! " 39 The Men of the Mountain " I am a rough fellow and hardened by this cam- paigning work. I fear it will say little to me though your sister be fair as the Star of the Shepherds which they see calling them home ! " Then David Alix told how his beautiful mother, left poor by the death of his father within a year after his own birth, had designed the boy from his cradle for that " ministr)' of the Word " which his father's life had, on these green Jura mountains, so well illustrated. To enable David Alix the Younger to do this under the most favourable auspices, Madame David the Elder had consented to marry a wealthy French banker, who for his own reasons was living retired on the borders of Switzerland, and, if reports were to be trusted, still making a considerable profit, at the time of his marriage, by finding money for the great watch manufacturers of Le Lochle and Fonds — both to increase their business, and also by enabling them to reach the French markets without having to submit their goods to the formality and expense of a Customs' examina- tion. His headquarters were south of Berets and directly opposite the French village of Chaillaxon, which Monsieur Villars had gradually made into a city of refuge for the most daring smugglers on all the frontiers of the East — men who, as the saying went, had " no cold in their eyes." But now, apparently, the Government of France was reaping the benefit of what it had so long attempted to suppress. For in all the districts occupied by the Germans there was not one in which they had to fight harder to maintain them- selves than in that smuggling, fighting, turbulent, debatable land of the Upper Doubs. 40 ' MY MOTHER'S HOUSE — THE FARM OF VILLARS CHAUMONT,' HE EXPLAINED. Jonathan and his David " And that," said David, " was largely the doing of my step-father. Monsieur Henri Antoine Villars, once a banker of Provence. Against himself I have nothing to say, that is, so far as I am personally concerned. He was a good husband to my mother, a good father to me. But his ways were not ours — at least, not mine. And since his death I have thought it my duty to repay into the estate that will one day be Noelie's, every centime of what he expended on making me a pastor ! " The Military Chaplain laughed aloud, and clapped his friend on the back. " Hear him," he cried. "Surely, my David, you have neglected the reading of your Bible ! Did you ever chance to read what the people of Israel did when they spoiled the Eg}'ptians ? I suppose, of course, that your step-father was a Catholic 1 " " No," David answered, regretfully and thoughtfully, " I do not think that a single thought of religion ever entered his head. But then, again, he did not in the least interfere with that of any one else. And that is why I was able without hindrance to become a mis- sioner of the Evangel at Edinburgh and Geneva, and also why my mother, though ten years married to this Provengal banker, continued to be known by the people among whom my father did his lifework as ' Madame David Alix ' ! " At this point David's tale seemed to hesitate a little. He looked down with, as it seemed, a certain shame, which caused the Military Chaplain to call out heartily, " What, my David, since you know so much about this smuggling business, own up, lad ! Did you not take a 41 The Men of the Mountain trip or two yourself across the frontier, when the blood was young and ran hotly in the veins ? " Instead of being helped to that confession which eases the soul, David appeared more embarrassed than ever. " It is not as you think," he said in a low voice, and with his eyes upon the goats' path by which they were descending into the valley ; " but — but — I have had doubts — doubts which I have never shared with any but you, Hermann, that since my father's death, my mother has continued and even increased his wholesale smuggling traffic ! " " And suppose she has, what then ? " said the Military Chaplain, with a friendly arm on David's shoulder. " Why, all women are born smugglers — the best of them will lie like ragpickers when passing through a Customs House. I have a mother at home. Better and more saintly has no man, and yet if Mother Falk came back from seeing her sister at Dorpat (which, you may remember, is in Russia) without both side-pockets bulging with caviare for herself and blond tobacco for the Father, she would feel that she had lost her opportunities — yes, and tempted Provi- dence by disdaining the good things it had put in her way ! Therefore be easy in j'our mind, my David. Let your mother smuggle a little or a great deal, according to the way of life in which her lot has been cast ! " David was not at all convinced by this reasoning. He felt, however, that it was no time to argue upon such questions. The Chaplain had arranged with his brother of the Stettiners to take his duty, so that he 42 Jonathan and his David was free for the night. It would be good, he thought, to dine once more with napkin and a white tablecloth before him, in a country not war-ruined, to see the gleam of silver on the board, and happy faces about it. He had the permission of the Colonel in his pocket, and in any case, was he not Hermann Falk, Chaplain of Trossel's Colberg Grenadiers, and in some wise confessor-extraordinary to the King-Emperor ? In any case, not a man to be lightly said " No " to ! He w^as accustomed rather to make his own way through things, this stalwart, vehement, martial, head- strong Chaplain of the Colberg Regiment ! But the Pastor was pursued by a certain diffidence. " Hermann," he said, " you will excuse my mother if you find her sympathies are strongly French in this sad business. The daughter of a French-speaking farmer in Alsace, the wife of a Provencal banker, with a daughter educated in Montauban and Paris, she is not like us other Switzers — French, Germans, and Italians dwelling under one roof, governed by one Confederation, without one being better considered than the others ! " " Ah ! " said the Chaplain, " you Swiss ! You are the marvels of Europe, spoiling the Egyptian at your leisure and according to your consciences — the only quarrel among your cantons being diat no one shall monopolise the plunder — Switzerland, to which come the powers of the earth and the glory of them, jingling their purses and saying, ' Here we are, strangers, pray take us in ! ' " But David held to his thought in his slow mild way. "You will be welcome in that part of the Chateau 43 The Men of the Mountain of Villars Chaumont which is mine. All I have is yours. You shall eat at my table and lie in my bed. For the rest, it will be better to shut your eyes and your ears to what neither you nor I can help ! " " Steady, my David," quoth the Chaplain of the Colbergers ; " I am neither a fool nor a youngling ; I find myself perforce in your mother's country, and these my people in the tents over yonder are making war on her friends and relatives — why, then, should I expect to be welcome .-' Why, if you were chaplain of the Jura mountain artillery, parked in front of my mother's house and cutting up her lawn with your horses' feet — well, it would be lucky for you that you understood no German. For if you did, your ears would assuredly tingle ! " The Pastor might still further have apologised, but Chaplain Hermann Falk abruptly bade him push on up the hill, for the sight of a good meal, well spread, would atone for much worse than a tongue-thrashing. "And if she will give me that, the lady your mother, she may stand over me and say what pleases her all the time. But in the present state of my appetite, the first necessity with me is not welcome, but dinner ! David, lead on ! " And, with the air of a general of division, he pointed up the path to the farm-chateau on the high terrace, chanting as he did so in English speech, but with a strong Germanic accent, " Courage, brother, do not stumble 1 " 44 CHAPTER VI. A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH THEY came into a new land as they climbed up and up. Away across the valley of the Doubs, on the French side, the farm of Les Collines still smoked, the last faint blue reek rising high into the still air. There, said David, a tragedy had been grimly acted out. Father Francois, his rifle broken into two pieces, lay dead on the threshold. At the corner of the granary his son Louis also had been left, the old blunderbuss he used for scaring rooks twisted underneath him ; Mother Francois — called La Grande Flore — sobbed somewhere, doubtless, on the edges of the woods. David, with arm extended, pointed it out to his friend, who stood with lowering brow, sighing deeply, the heart within him infinitely sad. " It is war ! " he muttered. " God help us, God give us peace ! Yet I see not how to prevent it. We ourselves — for I take you to be at heart of your adopted country — taught you the way. Often have I heard my Gran'ther Fritz tell of how it was after Jena and Eylau — still more after the Beresina, and again after Leipzig — the men of ever}' German bourg 45 The Men of the Mountain fell upon the rear of the French retreat. Then woe to the pillaging hussar who slipped a little aside from the main column in the hope that by good riding he mieht reeain his comrades with a brace of fowls or a ham a-swing at his saddle-bow. Perhaps the hope of schnapps tempted him, perhaps only the lust of adventure, seeing far off the chimney of a farm possibly yet unplundered ! Woe to the * galloper ' with a horse fallen suddenly lame. That day the ' Little Corporal ' waited in vain for despatches. A man fell out to bandage his feet, an infantryman eased himself of the sack which had been making his back feel like one single wound ! A rustling behind the hedge, the muzzle of a blunderbuss poked through almost against the back of the solitary man, a puff of blue smoke, some noise, but not much— for the peasants, poachers to a man, knew the secret of the quarter charge at short ranges — and then again at roll-call that night a man was lacking when ' Dubois ' or ' Rossel ' was called by the sergeant of his company! Then next day, as it has been done over yonder, peasant-folk were slain, women were widows or worse, and farm- house after farmhouse went up in flames like that poor Les Collines of P^re Francois ! " " Yes, I have heard it all," David answered ; " there are excuses enough — precedents to spare. I know that the peasants will, whatever I say, continue to make war in their own fashion, and when taken, be content to die for it. There have been guerillas, ' free corps,' solitary fighters in all wars. Why, my mother remembers how in 1814, at the Gorges of Toul, the peasants made a scheme, under the leadership of one 46 A Tooth for a Tooth Commander Brice, to carry off the Emperors Alex- ander and Francis. It took thirty thousand men to take the sovereigns through tlie pass ! Yes, thirty thousand, and with them the best artillery of the guard. Whereupon General Wrede, commanding the allied armies, solemnly summoned a court-martial and tried Commander Brice. He was condemned to death, in absence, and executed in efngy! But, says my mother in conclusion, ' that did not prevent him eating an excellent dinner in this very house thirty-five years after ! ' " Through the slight haze which the burning of Les Collines had spread along the Swiss plateau of the Doubs, they came to Villars Chaumont. David Alix, avoiding the great court, made as if to enter by a little door overlooking the hills of Canton Neuchatel. For this doubtless he had his reasons. There was a noise in the courtyard which made itself heard even above the rough voices of angry men in the heat of debate. It was the cry of a woman mourning the death of all that were dear to her — the cry which, in our colder regions of the north, is only heard when a child is born into the world. It was La Grande Flore wailing for her husband and son done to death, for the home plundered and burned, for her daughter and herself suddenly thrust out homeless and well-nigh mad. As the Chaplain of Trossel's Colbergers put his hand upon the little iron railing which protected the few worn steps that led up to David's private rooms in Villars Chaumont, a shot was fired from the window in the angle to the right. The Militarj^ Chaplain did 47 The Men of the Mountain not fall instantly. His right hand clutched more tightly the rail of the outside stairway. He felt his feet grow numb and heavy beneath him. The fingers of the other hand went groping uncertainly towards the breast of his tunic, and as David Alix, suddenly realising into what a death-trap he had unwittingly led the preserver of his life, turned suddenly on the threshold with the key still in his hand, the Military Chaplain fell forward into his arms. David carried his wounded friend to his own bed — no easy task for a man so much slighter than Hermann Falk. Hastily he locked the door, and without inquiry or pause stripped off the Chaplain's coat, cutting away the linen to lay bare the wound. It was under the shoulder to the right. The bullet, fired from above, had glided off the shoulder-blade, and embedded itself in the flesh near the backbone. Now David had learned something of surgery in a rough way in the couple of summer sessions spent at Edinburgh, when he frequented the hospitals. He saw at once that there would be no more campaigning for Hermann Falk for many a day. The first words of the Chaplain as he came to himself were characteristic. " David," he said, " I am glad you did not stick that knife of yours through my uniform coat. It is the only one I shall have till I see old Manteuffel's captain of equipment ! " " Oh, Hermann," David cried, his eyes brimming and his fingers knotting and untwining themselves with grief, " how can you ever forgive me for having brought you straight to this abode of bloody men ? 48 A Tooth for a Tooth I thought that here at least you would be safe ! In my mother's house, in my company — you, the man who only a little while ago saved my life ! " " The fortune of war, my David," said the Military Chaplain ; " but hand me my coat again. So — hold it for me." He groped long in the pockets with his untouched arm. " Ah, my pipe is safe, and you, good friend, Old Armed Neutrality, let me see if you are all ready to say your few words ! " And smiling like a child with a toy, the Chaplain clicked a spring and turned the revolving chamber of a regulation army officer's revolver, counting the cart- ridges as he did so. " One, two, three, four, five, and six ! Good ! What arms have you, my David, in case we should be again attacked ? " There was a pause while the wounded man inven- toried the contents of David's pockets and bedroom. " A pen-holder, a piece of sealing-wax, a clothes- brush — not much help there, David ! An ink-erasei — good ! A nail-file — better and better. There now, my David, that you have made me comfortable, don't you think that you might go off and see what it is all about, only — lock the door and take the key with you. I and old ' Armed Neutrality ' here will stop and keep watch ! " David Alix was going out when Hermann Falk called him back. " I suppose now I shall be a prisoner of war if these Swiss fellows of yours see me. I am across the boundary-line. But at any rate, get me a doctor who will take this piece of lead out — not one of those rascally French fellows who refused to attend on 49 E The Men of the Mountain their own men when Bourbaki came this way. A little too far with a French probe and it would be all over with Hermann Falk ! Oh, for old Schmidt of the Colbergers, though I quarrel with him every day and all the day ! But I suppose a Swiss-trained butcher will have to serve. Trossel's Colbergers cannot do without chaplain and doctor both at once, with, fraitc-tiretirs taking freedoms from every window even in peaceful Switzerland. But oh, David, see that the Colonel hears of this. What a disgrace if the Emperor's own chaplain were marked a deserter on the regimental rolls 1 " SO CHAPTER VII. SISTER NOELIE BUT instead of Pastor David Alix there came into the chamber of the wounded German chaplain a wonderful vision. In spite of locked doors it came, appearing in the shape of the young girl, one Noelie, half-sister to David Alix. She wore her black hair knotted low on her neck. Her eyes were dark also, and full of the softening mist of tears unshed. As she opened the door which David had locked so carefully, she tinkled a bunch of keys that hung at her waist. She found the Military Chaplain of the Col- bergers with his eye glinting along the tube of his revolver. For he knew not at all what, in that house from which he had been already fired upon, he might expect to enter when the door opened. But Noelie Villars entered fearlessly. With the master-key of the housewife in her hand, she smiled down upon Hermann Falk. " I come as a friend," she said, in very good German, " I am terribly sorry for what has happened. It was that poor mad woman whose husband and son were shot dead in front of their own burning dwelling — La Grande Flore of Les Collines. Before La Petite could 51 E 2 '■^' The Men of the Mountain stop her, she had seized her daughter's cJiassepot — she is in the Laroche corps, a heutenant — and fired at you as you were coming up the path ! " The MiHtary Chaplain nodded his head and let drop the muzzle of his pistol. He heard what the girl said in a sort of v-ague way, as if it were nothing personal to himself. It was as if he heard rather by some sixth sense than by his ears. The fever of his wound kept mounting within him. He saw through a milky blue haze which buzzed, but yet without himself losing consciousness in the least. Indeed, his perceptions seemed, if anything, clearer than before. Only he could not answer. His tongue refused its office. He was living in a kind of dream, contented, and ready to accept anything that was brought him by this young girl, the like of whom for daintiness and a curious practical precision of speech and action he had never seen. " Let me see the wound ! " The words seemed to arrive from afar. " You can safely trust to me. Not long ago I was Sister Noelie of the Schwesternhaus of the Red Cross above Neuchatel, to which the cars run on cogged wheels up the steep hill. So all this — your wound and all, is child's play to one who has nursed Bourbaki's men. There — turn a little on the pillow. I will call my brother David ! " It somehow appeared to the wounded man that if she went now, he would be left to the mercy of the mad woman. His speech returned. He called to her in German to stay with him, and ex-Sister Noelie, of the Schwesternhaus on the hill above the lake to which the cogged cars ran, turned on the threshold 52 HIS EVE GLINTING ALONG THE TUBE OF HIS REVOLVER. Sister Noelie of the door and signed imperiously to Hermann Falk to be silent. But she accompanied the gesture with a smile of encouragement which caused the Military- Chaplain to sink down with a sigh on his pillow. He understood that he was no longer a free agent, and if Sister Noelie, late of the Red Cross, had returned rifle in hand, he might have smiled, but he could not have moved hand or foot ! After that he did not remember much more, at least not clearly. Only she had not gone away. Someone else was there too. Who could it be .-* Oh, yes, David ! But again, who was David } What a fool he was ! Of course, the David of the old hacked benches in the Church history classroom, where they began to attend when the Principal threw himself clear of his gown that he might the more clearly grapple with the deep things of God (which are also the commonplaces of the life of man). There was that difficulty about the desires which a man cannot help — were they sinful or not .'* He must have that out with the professor. But before he could engage in theological argument, the soft touch of fingers dis- tracted him. Who would have thought that the Professor of Church History had a hand like cool velvet. And then, before Hermann Falk could make up his mind on this point (which somehow seemed all of a sudden more important than all philosophy), the whole world blurred and ran together with a sweet, sticky suffocation — which proceeded from a hand- kerchief imbued with chloroform that David Alix, under the direction of the doctor, held to his friend's face. 53 CHAPTER VIII. NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD PASTOR DAVID ALIX found his mother's neigh- bour, the farmer's wife of Les ColHnes, raging fiercely that she had not been allowed to enter and finish " the German murderer." For the moment he understood that there was nothing to be done with her. She would not even listen to his words, striking with her nails at his face like a cat loth to see her children drowned. He told her that it was not by any means the Pomeranian Regiment, of which his friend was chaplain, which had fired the farm and shot down her two bread-winners ; that was the act of Van der Tann's Bavarians. She would not listen, raving against all Germans and crying that she would die happy if only she could blood them one by one. Her daughter, the officer of franc-tireurs, whose fame and exploits had first called the attention of the in- vaders to the farm, sat holding her mother in her chair with the strong, weather-nipped hands that had so easily managed the diassepot in many a stiff skirmish. She was whispering in her mother's ear. David could not make out her words, but seeing that they 54 Not Peace, but a Sword calmed the furious woman far more than his untimely ministrations, he left the two together. Lieutenant Flore Frangois, of the Laroche Free Corps, was not by any means enforcing spiritual consolations to the mother who had seen the blood of her beloved. On the contrary, speaking for the Laroche Corps and for herself, she promised vengeance, sure, prompt, and complete. Not one who had had anything to do with the slaughter of Father Francois and the young Louis should escape. It was certainly no time for David to persist. The gospel of forgiveness to enemies stood no chance within sight of the smoking, blood-drenched threshold of Les CoUines, on the hill over against the window of Villars Chaumont where widowed mother and fatherless daughter sat together. Their spirit was that which sent down Samson to slay the Philistines. David went to his mother's chamber to ask for her assistance. It was empty. A deep cupboard in the wall stood open. He looked within. It extended far under the stoop of the roof, and contained rifles and packages of ammunition, closely and carefully ranged. It was the first time that David had acquired any certainty as to the purpose his mother had in making Chateau Villars Chaumont a rendezvous of so many men — men lying on straw in barns and sheds, men sleeping among the hay in the byres, men to be lodged all night and fed all day, coming in at meal- times from outlying chalets and fodder-sheds. For long, indeed, he had feared that his mother, caught by his step-father's example, had continued the course of successful smuggling by which he had 55 The Men of the Mountain re-made his fortune. But this was something infinitely worse. Chaumont was neither a dep6t for feeding the unfortunate, as he had once ignorantly imagined, nor yet a smuggling centre, as he had feared, but an illegal place of arms on neutral soil ! Certainly David Alix was a Frenchman by adoption, but his Genevan birth and Presbyterian upbringing caused him to shrink from what, if known in Germany, might bring the victorious armies of the new-made Kaiser upon the free Swiss cantons, and especially upon those of the south and west, where the French speech of the people presupposed French sympathies. David Alix stood a moment silent before the array of arms. He was not a man of strong sudden resolve like his friend, the Chaplain of Trossel's Colbergers. In such matters he felt the need of advice. His life had been that of a student, early designed to the work for which, when the day came, he felt himself best fitted. This fratri- cidal war had from the first filled him with deep sorrow. Why all this killing ? For the sake ol vindicating the honour of one country or another ! What was honour ? Could it only be supported by slaughter, pain, death ? He could not but think that there were other ways. Perhaps if the sacred soil of the Confederation had been invaded, David Alix, the Genevan, might have thought differently. But the Swiss pastor, naturally a man of peace, had not taken on the desperation of French patriotism along with his citizen's ticket. It was very different with his mother. No fiercer partisan ever set out across the boundary of the Franche Comte to harass an invader than the 56 Not Peace, but a Sword preacher's widow. Over an area of many square miles Madame David the Elder was known. Her son, the Pastor, was indeed the distributor of gifts of food for the healthy, of wine and medical comforts for the ailing or the wounded. He carried them to Protestant and Catholic alike. But when he entered with the upraised hand of benediction, and the prayer that God's peace should be upon the house, some young fellow in a corner would thrust a hat, with a rakish cock's feather stuck into the band of it, hastily underneath the seat, and keep his feet very squarely to the front, lest the minister should know that he also had been "out" — with a rifle in his hand — and his life not worth five minutes' purchase if the Bavarians got hold of him. Yet that same young fellow would look after the tall form, clad in deep-skirted black, with something like a grin on his face. He appreci- ated the Pastor — no man more. But he chuckled at the thought that it was Madame of Villars Chaumont herself who had placed that rifle in his hand and adjusted the feather in his hat. For which good gift it was the least that he could do to toss the soft plumed hat upon his head, drop a double handful of cartridges into his pouch, and take the road, crouching behind hedges and following the skirts of woods, to see that the Pastor lacked not suitable convoy in that country of marauder-. In his heart of hearts, he considered him not a little " soft " — which opinion he did not state in words, but conveyed it by a little sidelong movement of the hand across his brow with the index-finger extended. On this occasion, after several failures, David Alix 57 The Men of the Mountain found his mother in the buttery, directing half-a-dozen men how to fill cartridges for a dozen or two smooth- bore guns standing in the corner. " Mother, I should like to speak with you a moment," said David Alix. She turned upon him with black eyes in which was a glitter like olive oil. She was not a very tall woman, but every gesture affirmed command — and the consciousness of power. She turned with a certain quick fury on her face, but the expression faded at sight of her son standing in the doorway. She went out to him instantly, closing the door, while the men who had been filling the cartridges kept their backs persistently turned to the Pastor. " Well, David, and what is it .'' " said his mother, smoothly enough. " Mother, you break my heart," he answered her. " You know well what has happened ; they have shot the man who saved my life a day or two ago when I was arrested in company with Jules le Noir, his gun yet warm from the killing of the Prussian officer, and provisions for a dozen about my waist and in the skirts of my coat ! Then I bring the man who saved me, my friend and fellow-student, to my mother's house that she may thank him. Instead, as he mounts the steps of my own chamber — even as I hold the door open for my guest — your guest — to pass in, he is treacherously shot down ! " Madame David the Elder took her son's arm and led him over to the window which looked down upon the little staircase where the Chaplain had received 58 Not Peace, but a Sword his wound. First she pointed to the slight stain on the top step where Hermann Falk had fallen, then across the misty Doubs valley to the smouldering ruins of what had been the thriving farm of Les Collines. The shrug of her shoulders clinched the unspoken argument more clearly than words. "But," cried David, indignantly defending his friend, " Hermann Falk had nothing to do with that — neither he, nor his regiment, nor even his army corps ! " "You speak like the son of your father, the Genevan," retorted his mother, " not like the French- man you are by voluntary adoption. For me, I would rather have died than taken my life as a gift from the King of Prussia himself! The man you brought here is a German — a barbarian, a burner of houses, a slayer of men ! " "Mother," said the Pastor gently, "he was my bench-comrade at Edinburgh. Then there was neither Jew nor Greek among us, but only men of one blood striving in holy emulation to learn the things of God!" The face of the Pastor's widow twitched. She heard a sound as of unforgotten music ; she dwelt once more peacefulh- beside a Man of Peace. In- stinctively she looked at her hands. The}- were grimed with the powder-dust of her laborator}-, and in a moment of shame she slid them behind her. " I am sorry," she said, with more meekness than she had yet shown. " I did all I could to prevent her. But the truth is, that the woman was mad. They had made her mad, and your friend, wearing their uniform, had to bear the consequences ! " 59 The Men of the Mountain " Where is she now ? " David Alix asked in his slow, measured wa}'. " She has gone away with her daughter back to Les ColHnes ! " said his mother. The Pastor had a soft persistence which could always extort an answer from his mother, and indeed from all between Le Lochle and Pontarlier. Every shepherding boy and wandering goose-girl knew him as " Our Pastor David." They loved him for his beautiful counten- ance, like that of the young shepherd, that David, son of Jesse, who was a dweller in Bethlehem. For the like reason also they loved him ; and without him no feast could go forward, nor any anointing blessing be poured out. Yet their affection was almost maternal and wholly protective. The men were careful to hide their guerilla exploits from him, while they would willingly boast of these to his mother, having discerned in her the warlike spirit which is the characteristic of the French borderer, especially on the side of the south- east. David the Peacemaker did not give up hope at once. He wrestled with his mother ; he pled with her. He quoted Scripture, and even prayed for the opening of her heart, the touching of her conscience. His peace apostolate came from no fear of death. Was he not the man who in the morning redness had faced the levelled needle-guns at Mouthe .'' A dozen times a day he took his life in his hand, crossing the German posts, and marching through woods thick with lawless men behind every bush, as like as not looking at him along the barrel of a 60 Not Peace, but a Sword gun. David Alix was ready to die rather than that the least of his duties should be left undone. But to the Genevan, trained in Presbyterian equality of the sternest sort, it seemed as wicked that the }-oung franc-tireur should shoot a sentr}- from a steady rest, a man against whom personally he had no grudge, as that in revenge the Bavarians should burn Les Col- lines and shoot its two defenders, the man Frangois and the boy Louis ! However, his mother declared to him that, of a surety. La Grande Flore had returned with her daughter to Les Collines. " And," she added, " if we do not have news of these Bavarians by to-morrow, something will surely have befallen them on the way." David turned away with a sigh. He had, he knew, effected nothing real with his mother. Still, he was glad that the poor demented Widow Francois of Le- Collines was gone. He took a glass and examined the long road by which he and Hermann Falk had come to the house of Villars Chaumont. It seemed such a long time since that they had laughed in Madame Virginie's in Mouthe, where the Chaplain of Colberg's Grenadiers had his lodgings. Then he returned to the chamber of the wounded man. The door was locked and bolted. But within he heard a soft stir. He tapped, and then after a moment's pause came the whisper, " David 1 " " Noelie ! " he answered. There was no need for more. None had a voice like David Alix, so gentle, so gracious, so persuasive. The door was opened. The Militar}- Chaplain was asleep, his strong face turned towards the window. The sunlight fell on the blonde hair and 6i The Men of the Mountain golden beard of the Goth, softened and harmonised by the few greying hairs which ran through both, and denoted rather youth well-exercised and manhood in maturity, than any approach of age. A book and some knitting lay on the little table beside the ordinance revolver of the Chaplain. As she worked, Noelie had been reading the Gospel of Saint John — " Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. . . . Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." But even as she settled herself again to her evening lesson, across the valley of the Doubs there came the distant rattle of musketry, and on the horizon near the end of the lake, now almost hidden from view by the rising mists, a hamlet began to flame redly. David held aside the curtain to look. " It is Launay des Marais. God help the poor folk over yonder. I must go ! It is my duty ! " Noelie pointed to the bed where the Chaplain slept peacefully on, habituated to the noises of war. " Your duty is here ! " she said. And to the maiden's word the wiser elder brother bowed his head. Presently he looked forth again, and as evening darkened, all the sky above grew red with the un- certain "skarrow" of burning houses, till David, with his hand on his heart, murmured helplessly, " How long, O Lord, how long .-* " And again, as if with some involuntary reproach he sighed, " Not peace, but a sword ! " 62 CHAPTER IX. THE ELDER BROTHER WHO WOULD NOT COME IN IN his soul David Alix mourned over the interrup- tion of his work. His chapels were occupied as stables by the Bavarian cavalry, who respected the holy things of neither Catholic nor Protestant, made pipe-lights of the pulpit Bible, and gave David's plain Genevan gown to the stable-guard for a sleeping- cloak. Only a few women, here and there, full of fears and trembling for what they might find on their return, stole from their homes to this cottage or that other, where David, as in the old times of the Vaudois, his predecessors, was to preach and pra}^ There they called upon their God, and with low and trembling voices offered to Him a sacrifice of praise. Once even, in the house of Madame Virginie at Mouthe, the sacrament of the Lord's Supper had been cele- brated. There was hardly a sound as the unspoken prayers went up from the women's anxious hearts. Hardly one of them but had a son under the colours, or, as was the custom of that border country, fighting among the ravines and pine woods *' for his own hand." Few were the communicants who knew at the moment 63 The Men of the Mountain when they tasted the sacred bread and wine, whether their own son (or perhaps several sons) was aHve or dead. It brought the tears to David's eyes only to look at these women, whom he had known young and active a few months ago, now prematurely old, sitting close, almost huddling together, the white-bordered Jura " mutch " shaking with the sobs that rent their hearts. Many had already clothed themselves in that black crape, which was to be the uniform of the women of provincial France for so many years — indeed, is so even to this day. But all heads were bowed into wet kerchiefs, save only the mother of David herself, who sat like an image in grey stone, looking resolutely out over the heads of her kneeling sisters, apparently not at all touched with their grief, though really feeling it come nearer to herself than any. No man was present, but towards the close a young man in the uniform of the Mobiles, the chevrons of sergeant on his arm, entered and sat down on a seat near the door. With a brief gesture he refused the bread and wine of communion, though David offered him the emblems with his own hand. " Some stray soldier of a broken corps," thought David Alix. " Perhaps a Catholic — perhaps a spy. Well, he will learn nothing but ' the Way ' here." The young man remained fixed during the service, his eyes on the preacher. But at the close he waited outside, and with the quiet ease of an educated man introduced himself to David Alix. " I beg your pardon for interrupting you in the duties of your office, but I think my name may be interesting to you. I am Ludovic Villars of St. 64 THE YOUNG MAN REMAINED EIXED DIKING THE SERVICE. The Elder Brother Gabriel, in Provence, and I have reason to believe that my father married your mother," For a moment David was taken aback. He knew not what to answer. The young man went on. " I am also given to understand that my father died a rich man, and that you are in enjoyment of his wealth. I am an advocate of the bar of Montpellier and (as appeared to be my duty) I have made myself acquainted with all the circumstances. It apj;ears to me that some reparation is due to me. I have edu- cated myself, working at a trade during half the year and studying at a university the other part, while you have been educated at my father's expense. You have spent several years abroad, all without the least exertion on your part." " Sir, you are mistaken in much that }'0U say," David answered gently. " I will set your mind at rest upon all these questions. But this holy day and the close of the solemn service in which you have seen us engaged, appears to me (as I am sure that upon consideration to you also) to be particularly ill-suited for the discussion of questions of interest." " Sir," said the other, with the first gleam of a dangerous anger in his voice and a deep, long-con- tained rage against fate in his eyes, " I do not speak of questions of interest, but of justice. I was brought up in my native town and pointed to by all as the son of a disgraced man. Disgraced my father may have been, but what is certain is that he remained rich. You and not I have reaped the benefit of those riches. I defy you to say that you have not. You have sat at ease alone with vour books, while I have been 65 F The Men of the Mountain working with my hands for the poor pence wherewith to pay my college fees." David threw out his hands with a little sudden gesture in which there was some real pain. " I am deeply grieved," he said ; " it is true that for a time I benefited by the bounty of my mother's second husband, the late Monsieur Henri Villars. But I have repaid into the estate every franc that he spent upon me, as, were I at home, I could speedily convince you." " What is it, David .-' " inquired his mother, coming up quickly, as it were summoned by the grave face of the Pastor. " Who is this young man .? " But the sergeant-advocate of St. Gabriel was quite able and exceedingly willing to introduce himself At the first words the fiery lady sent her son about his business. " Go in and see the people ^\'ho are waiting for a word of advice from you — there, in Madame Virginie's. Off with you, and remember to tell that old hypocrite Peazoo that he gets no crumb of bread from me after this. It will teach him to go selling fat fowls to the Prussians. I believe that he fed his chickens with our bread, the old plaster-faced wretch." The words, as well as the vigorous action of the lady, warned the advocate of Montpellier that in her he had quite a different adversary to deal with. " You claim to be the son of my late husband, Henri Villars," she began. " Concerning that I know nothing. But this I do know — he left his whole property to me during my lifetime, with reversion to our only daughter Noelie — as indeed he had an 66 The Elder Brother exceedingly good right to do — for it was I who helped him to make that money and to regain the position he had lost. As for you, sir, I have never so much as heard of your existence till this moment." " Madame," said the advocate, " you will assuredly hear a great deal about me before I shall be content to put up with such an injustice." " Sir," she said, " I warn you, as a mother once removed, that you will only lose your time." " There is law in France and I am a French lawyer," came the answer, " though I have ^'orked with my hands to attain that position," Madame David the Elder, which is to say Madame Henri Villars, smiled a little bitterly at the young man. " If you care to know. Sergeant, your spirit pleases ■me, infinitely better than that of some others. For instance, I dare say that you are a far better man than he whom you claim for your father. But that is not what I have to look to. At present all my capital is embarked on a great venture — the saving of my country, or at least of this part of it, from the invader." " I also have some little claims that way," said the young man, touching the silver of his sleeve. Madame David the Elder smiled with some approval, but when the sergeant of Mobiles made a pointed reference to the peaceful occupations of her son, whose voice could be heard speaking within, she turned upon him fiercely with the words, " Young man, I do not know how it comes about that you are here property-hunting, nor yet what your states of service may be. But if you 6l F 2 The Men of the Mountain are feeding fifty families within the German lines, each one at the risk of your life — if ever you have been as near death as was my son when they thrust him against the wall of this very house in front of which we are talking, with an enemy's firing-party cuddling their cheeks to the stocks of their needle- guns, then— but not till then — you may have a right to compare yourself with Pastor David Alix." But the fierce old lady had still a shot left in her locker. " You spoke just now of the law and of taking that which is mine from me. I do not say that in the case of your satisfying me that you are in reality what you claim to be, my daughter and I might not be inclined to give " The youiig man interrupted her sharply, " Thank you, madame," he said with intense irony, " I did not come here to ask for charity, but for my rights. It is all or nothing." " Then," cried Madame David the Elder, fiercely, " let it be nothing. Henri Villars was a Swiss citizen, and every farthing of which he died possessed is safe within the Confederation of the Twenty-two Cantons. Neither you nor your French law can touch it." 68 CHAPTER X. AN ENEMY WITHIN THE GATE ALOFT in the Chateau-Farm of Villars Chaumont, looking down on the clear green rush of the narrow Doubs, the Military Chaplain was being read to sleep. This is a feat which, ordinarily, can only be performed by a lady of respectable age, using upon inexpressive poetry that low monotonous voice which is such an excellent thing in the sick-room. The Reverend Mr. Crabbe gives good results, his charming verse being of an even flow. But the Idylls of the King, which had been little Noelie's choice, her delightful French accent (as Military Chaplain Falk thought) in pronouncing the English words, an indes- cribable tang of the sharper northern speech of Edinburgh — for it was her brother who had taught her — together with a certain strangeness in finding himself thus alone with a young girl in the guest- chamber of a Swiss chateau, all combined to maintain Hermann Falk awake. Not that he attended very closely. On the contrary, he let the voice run on far ahead of the sense, and if he missed the record of any of the deeds of that " noble fellowship of all the Table 69 ^o ') The Men of the Mountain Round," who shall blame him ? He was still weak from his wound, tired with the daily dressing of it, and glad to repose a little. Further — and who shall cast the first stone ? — there is not a doubt that he paid most attention to the clear-cut profile lifted between him and the window, even though had he looked so far he might have seen the green swelling uplands of the Swiss Jura across the hassins (as the inhabitants on both sides of the valley call the lakes which lie at the bottom of the limestone gorges). Everything was fierce, gloomy, war-swept on the French side — farms and villages fuming and desolate, with blackened rafters pointing steeply to the sky. But through the window at which Noclie Villars sat, the Military Chaplain could look upon a brighter scene. It was not till long afterwards that Hermann Falk understood the delicacy of the intention which had transferred him to the side of Chaumont. Here he could look upon soft and happy slopes, meadows and vergers descending to the lake's edge, and the untroubled peace of a summer Sabbath morn lying upon the Land of the Red Cross. Hermann knew little of women. His nature had fitted him more for dealing with men. Even as one of the King's chaplains and a prominent man in Berlin, he had instinctively given himself to the poor in search of work, or working-men just sufficiently misinstructed by their daily newspaper to fancy them- selves philosophers and atheists. He was, in the opinion of the highest authorities, the best chaplain in all the armies. Even the stout old King had by this time heard of and mourned for his wounded counsellor, 70 An Enemy within the Gate laid by the heels on the same neutral territory which guarded more than 80,000 of the unfortunate army of Bourbaki. Small wonder that the Military Chaplain felt the strangeness of his position. Presently the girl looked up. " I do not believe that you have been attending at all ! " she said imperiously, making believe to stamp her foot on the cool parqueted floor. " Now tell me what I have just been reading to you about .? " The Military Chaplain was not in the least abashed. He replied promptly with the single line of all the Tennysonian cycle which had remained in his mind. " Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat ! " " There, what did I tell you } " she cried, feigning a pretty quick anger and slapping the leaves of the book together with a disgusted air. " Here have I been wasting time and breath in reading this hard English to you, and you asleep all the time, or pretending, which is worse. Because when Doctor Rheudi comes to-morrow I shall have no good account to give of you. We read about * Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,' the day before yesterday, and now we are in the middle of the noblest passage of all, that where Arthur forgives the Queen " " Ah," said the Military Chaplain calmly, " he for- gives her, does he ? Then why do not you forgive me if forgiveness is in the air } Why not forgive an old fellow whose hair is not so crisp and yellow as once it was, for thinking that the well-born Reiter von 71 The Men of the Mountain Lancelot would have been wiser if he had stayed along with his armour in that chamber, high in a tower to the east, in which the Lady Elaine, equally well-born, guarded his sacred shield ! " Noelie was too unpractised in such talk to take all his meaning, but she understood the spirit, and answered contritely, *' Forgive you — of course I for- give you. Only you are foolish to say that you are old. Why, our David — my brother, that is — has ten times more grey hairs in his head than you, though yours is often like a haystack before they begin to thatch it over with straw ! " " And pray, my dear nurse, whose fault may that be ? Surely you would not, much as you dislike me, venture to reproach a poor wounded man with the disarray of his toilette .-' " And that is why Noelie Villars, going to the kitchen somewhat hurriedly for hot water and clean towels, found the refugees whom the prospect of dinner had collected from the outhouses, which the goodwill of her mother caused them to consider as their own, engaged in a heated argument in the kitchen. More than one man had his hand on the side-pocket where he carried his concealed weapon. The noise was so great that Noelie's footsteps were not heard. She was almost in the kitchen, a large ground-floor apartment, timbered and raftered in the ancient manner, before any of the disputants was in the least aware of her coming. She heard a voice say, " Chaplain or no chaplain, I tell you the man is a German. Do not the Germans shoot us on sight without asking who or what we are ? 72 An Enemy within the Gate It is the law of talion. Why then should not we slay him ? Can any of you give me a reason ? " He was answered by half-a-dozen voices. " He is wounded. He is the guest of the lady who out of her goodness, because her heart is with us, gives every man-jack of us shelter, food, protection. He was brought here by our own Pastor David, who feeds our families over yonder, going freely where we dare not set foot ! " By this time Noelie had paused, standing motionless and breathless on the turn of the stairs, for the first time in her life listening eagerly and without shame to that which did not concern her. The next words cleared much of the doubts which still lingered in her mind. " What is that to me ? " cried the first voice. " I have nothing to do with you or your shelter, with rich or poor among you. Whatever these folks do or give out of their abundance, depend upon it they still keep the most and the best for themseU^es. ' The crumbs that fall from the rich man's table ' — pshaw, I know all about them ! I do not beg, I take these things as a right — a right which I think not even Madame, the good landlady of this hostelry, would dare dispute. But enough of this. The man is a German, and die he must. What difference does it make to La Petite Flore there, whether he be Pomeranian or Bavarian } Was not one as free with his bullets as the other with his house-burning ? " " Not so long as I am here. Master Advocate ! " " Not while I have life in my body or a bullet in my pouch ! " cried other voices. 73 The Men of the Mountain There was, in fact, a great division among them, and doubtless blood would have been shed save for the appearance of Madame herself on the threshold. She came out of the basse coiir, a basket of eggs in one hand and her arms full of vegetables for the evening pot-aii-feii. By bending a little Nodlie could see her mother standing in the doorway, her sun- bonnet pushed far back on her head, and the sunlight from behind the trees flecking her cheek — a brave, bold, handsome woman, knowing no fear and accus- tomed to command, paying little heed to other women, and at her ease among all men. Noelie had no fear for her mother. She had seen her deal, not with one only, but with a score of men. Yet there was something about the appearance of this young man, who, in the middle of the paved kitchen-place of Villars Chaumont, cool and dusky, stood as it were at defiance. There passed through her the flash of an incommunicable dislike, mingled with a faint stirring of admiration. Yet his face attracted her too. He was like someone — she could not remember who. That carriage of the head, that air of assurance, at once hostile and picturesque, the watchful eye of a fox, often hunted, but never caught— where had she seen all these qualities .'' Her father ! She blushed with shame at the suggestion even as it crossed her mind. Her father! Had he not been gracious to all the world .'* She remembered how he used to take her on his knee, and let her rummage in his pockets for sweetmeats. He had amused himself in the train by dividing them into many tiny packets, and hiding them here and there about him, in this pocket and 74 An Enemy within the Gate in that. Sometimes, too (it was all part of the game), he would let a full bag drop, and then join in the scramble when the paper burst, laughing heartily. He would even tie a parcel to Noelie's long curls, and then accuse her of trying to steal his property. These were good days, and why should she remember them, looking at this old-young man in the dress of a sergeant of Mobiles on the floor of her mother's kitchen .'' The young man stood his ground, smiling cynically, with a kind of pride of disdain. She had never seen any one, except David, in some great matter of right and wrong, thus brave her mother to her face. But, looking again, Noelie began to notice something harsh and vulgar in the strong lines of the face, something desperate and bad under the confidence of the smile. She felt for the man a strong dislike, bordermg on fear. Yet undoubtedly there was some- thing strangely attractive about him too, at least in the eyes of Noelie Villars. Her mother went to the great table ; she handed the vegetables to this one and the other to prepare in haste. For with so many hungry mouths to feed, the business of the chateau-farm must go forward whatever happened. Then Madame, without once regarding the enemy she knew to be before her, with twelve little clicks, brusque and purposeful, broke a dozen of eggs into a bowl for the omelette of the day. Those who had been chosen as assistants went to their tasks in the midst of the great hush that had fallen upon the kitchen. For a full minute nothing was heard but the scrape of the knife preparing the vegetables 75 The Men of the Mountain fjr the pot, and, from the back kitchen, with its narrow-grated windows, the crisp whisk-whisk of the fork against the sides of the omelette-bowl. Nothing gave any hint of the trouble that was so swiftly to befal. Madame turned suddenly on the aggressor, and in a low and concentrated voice she uttered the single word of inquiry, " Well ? " (In French the " Eh^ bien f " is still more defiant and expressive, especially when pronounced, " £h, bhmi ! " as is the custom of the country.) As Madame said it, the ejaculation sounded instant and energetic as the " Stand and deliver ! " of a highwayman. " Madame," the young man answered, " I do not need to tell you by what right I stand here. You are the widow of my father, Henri Villars of St. Gabriel in Provence. / am his only son. I have come to claim my share of the inheritance due to me." Madame David the Elder never blenched in the least. She only moved a step or two nearer to the young man. And the curious thing is, that though he did not retreat before her, several others in the kitchen instinctively drew back a step. They had known Madame David, as it were, during two lives. " You have already had your answer," she said. '• What then are you doing here .'' All that is in this place is mine, in trust for my daughter. And these good people will aid me to preserve her rights," " But,'' said the young man, " without your daughter to give you a claim you would only have a right to the income of the money. That matter perhaps may be arranged. Things more wonderful have happened." 76 An Enemy within the Gate He turned about and in a louder tone, like one who addresses an audience, cried to the crowd in the kitchen, " True Frenchmen, patriots of the Doubs and Jura, the enemy are shooting j-ou down. They are burning your farms, carrying off your horses and cattle, s'vstematically starving you to death." At this point a clamour of voices came from the refugees bunched together in a corner. " In this house we have been fed, clad, sheltered, and armed. Shall we stand by Madame David or shall we not ? " Then arose a confused roaring sound, the majorit}' clearly crying out for their benefactors of Villars Chaumont ; but the trained voice of the young advocate of St. Gabriel cleft the uproar as easil}- as a knife cuts cheese. " Who among you does not see that these folk are betraying j'ou under pretence of helping you ? The parson goes day by day into the German lines. No one hinders him. If any one of you did as much, would you not be dangling from a tree] or with your brains splattered against the nearest wall. Why did /le escape when our comrade Le Noir was shot, down ? Both of them were taken together, judged together. Would you seek the reason .'' It is up the stairs yonder — a German, a spy, the comrade of your precious pastor, the intimate and confessor of the Emperor William himself — he is in this house. He is in your power. Will you suffer the traitor, the murderer of your parents and children, to escape ? " 77 The Men of the Mountain And as the young man finished his harangue, a woman in black forced her way to his side, dominating the audience. The refugees of Villars Chaumont saw before them the tall figure of La Grande Plore brandishing a chassepot and sword-bayonet "He shall not escape," she cried. 78 CHAPTER XI. THE DEFENCE OF THE EAST WING THE attack, apparently sudden, had nevertheless been well concerted, and the death of the Chaplain Hermann Falk resolved upon in advance. There were, indeed, an unusual number of newcomers about the chateau that day ; Madame herself had remarked upon it. But knowing, as she did, all about the great " sweep " which the Germans were making all along the frontier of Switzerland, she naturally put down the increase of her guests to new refugees, franc-tii'eurs, solitary fighters, and the last scrapings, the debris of Bourbaki's army ; men who had been wilfully " lost," whom the bitter cold had caused to fall out, with frozen hands and toes, along the weary road to Verrieres. But though her mind was troubled as to the serving of so many additional mouths, Madame David the Elder had gone out peacefully enough into the gardens and potagers of Villars Chaumont, seeking what she could find to make a meal for the strangers. So well had the matter been arranged that those closest in sympathy with Madame David the Elder were taken wholly by surprise. There was not one 79 t'^'^ The Men of the Mountain who had the presence of mind to interpose between the franc-tireiirs, headed by the sometime sergeant of Mobiles, Ludovic Villars, seconded by La Grande Flore, and the staircase leading to the upper rooms, where, in the east wing, lay Hermann Falk. Madame David herself was elbowed out of the way in a moment, in spite of the fact that the old and faithful servants and habittiis of the house drew round her as if by instinct. Not one of these thought at all of the tragedy which was enacting above, till their mistress reminded them. " Leave me," she cried. " Is a man, and the friend of David my son, to be falsely accused and cruelly murdered in the house — my house, to the hospitality of which he committed himself.-*" Which certainly shows that the Military Chaplain had gained ground and favour since David had brought him up the steep path through the pine-woods that led from the snow-whitened valley of the Doubs to the house of Villars Chaum.ont. Nevertheless, at that moment it needed more than s}'mpathy to save the life of the Chaplain of the Colberg Grenadiers. The thought, first prompted by delicacy, of putting the wounded man in the east wing of the chateau-farm, turned out an exceedingly fortunate one. All the rest of Villars Chaumont was an ancient fortress, rearranged for the wants of an ordinar}' household of the class and means of the late owner. But the east wing had been specially built by Henri Villars for the needs of his trafficking. It contained, besides his various strong boxes built into the wall, an entire upper storey specially strengthened 80 The Defence of the East Whig for defence. The basement and lower court (store- houses and vaults for the articles which he desired to spare the French authorities the pain of examining at their Customs' bureaux) had all been built wholly without wood and were closed by iron doors. A steel drawbridge, light and easily worked by a few turns of a fly-wheel fixed into the wall, gave access to the building or shut it off. Here Henri Villars, with drawbridge raised like a knight in his castle, had been wont to work far into the night. Sometimes he had slept there as well, indeed, in the very room which the Chaplain was now occupying. It was well, therefore, that the girl, going down to the kitchen for her provision of hot water and towels from the linen cupboard adjoining, paused on the stairs, held motion- less by the turmoil below. It was because of this that Ludovic and La Grande Flore, with their rabble of broken and desperate frontiersmen behind them, stood at the little platform upon which Henri Villars' steel bridge descended, and gazed helplessly into space. Those behind pressed forward, and vigorous and determined resistance on the part of those who stood nearest was required to prevent the pressure from hurling them into the gulf Then a voice from a little barred window to the left called out, in clear girlish tones, yet with something of her mother's authority in it, " Stand back there, or I fire ! " Ludovic Villars instantly raised his rifle to his shoulder, and would have let go w^ithout question at the grating. But La Grande Flore, in spite of her madness recognising the voice of her daughter's friend, threw up the muzzle of the chassepot, so that the 8i G The Men of the Mountain bullet lost itself harmlessly among the chimney-pots. Standing there the young man could easily see that, approached from this direction, the east wing was as impregnable as rhe architect his own father, had meant it to be. " Back there," he shouted, " we must finish our German in some other way." A few struggled forward to make sure that the case was as impossible as the leaders said. In more than one case these inquiring spirits came very near to breaking their bones on the paved court below. But at last the most eager was satisfied and all retreated, only, however, to find themselves faced by Madame David the Elder. For a moment she had been swept aside. The casual thrust of an elbow in the chest had angered her terribly. This woman, so long accustomed to command, was hurt in her pride of house and people. As soon as the kitchen was clear she had promptly rallied half-a-dozen of the men-servants, carles dour and ill to drive. These were they who had helped her with her underground railway, by which, in spite of authorities both cantonal and Teutonic, arms and ammunition had been conveyed to the occupied districts. Such men, once on their guard, had little difficulty in breaking up the retreat of the armed rabble who followed La Grande Flore and the ex- sergeant of Moblots. They barred the descent to the kitchen and lower storerooms of the house. With a barrier of ba3'onets and loaded rifles they turned the ebb of flight at right angles across the hall and down the wide steps which led from the front door. Only one lingered within, fixed on the verge of the 82 ' BACK THKKE,' HE SHOUTED, ' WE MIST FINISH t)UR GERMAN" IN SOME OTHER WAY.' The Defence of the East Wing little landing-stage from which the steel bridge had been removed not a moment too soon. Ludovic Villars, rifle in hand, stood still, sullenly angered that his destined prey was escaping him. Whether that prey was to be the German whom he loathed by race and temperament, or also the half-sister, the daughter of his father, whom he had learned to hate as his supplanter, even the young man could hardly have told. He stood dumbly gazing at the barrier of emptiness, so narrow but so efficient. Then the door opened and there stood before him, as it had been, his second self in the form of a young girl. Noelie had the Chaplain's revolver still in her hand. But at the sight of the young man so near her that they could almost have clasped hands across the gulf of air, she involuntarily let the weapon drop to her side. They saw their own images, as it had been, in a glass darkly. Only to the young man his sister seemed taller and more lissom, with smaller features, and her dark hair of a duskier, crisper luxuriance. But the eyes were the same, of an infinite dark grey, though Noelie had them less closely set together and without the eye- brows meeting above, thick and lowering, sure sign of a gloomy and jealous temperament. Brother and sister stood thus for a moment, face to face, the chassepot twitching in the young man's hands. Half-involuntarily it rose half-way to his shoulder, but instantly it fell again. He could not commit a murder so unprovoked and so brutal. To clear an obstacle out of his way in the heat of a fight, even though that obstacle were a woman, had appeared to him possible ; but standing alone, with only a couple of yards or so 83 G 2 The Men of the Mountain of space cutting him off from his nearest relative in the world, his sister's death suddenly presented itself to him as an impossibility. He had not thought of it so before. Fate rather than Nature had made him bitter and cruel. Men and things had dealt hardly with him. He had turned the mangle with small blistered hands during the years that his father was making a great fortune in Switzerland. After that he had been an apprentice zinc-worker and plumber, risking his neck among the crumbling tiles on lofty housetops. Education, hardly wrenched by self- sacrifice from the grip of circumstance, had only embittered him the more. He trembled with anger at the thought of David Alix in a foreign university, all his needs supplied without effort or desert from his father's money. Still more he hated this girl who was to be the heiress of the farms and vineyards, the scrip and share, together with the finest fields of " vert " (which is to say, the wormwood out of which absinthe is made) between Coulon and Verrieres — all that of rights ought to have been his own. Ludovic Villars turned and went out of the house which had been his father's, equally heedless of the angers of Madame and the threatening arms of her faithful escort. The young man was drowned in a dream of the things that might have been. He was the natural rebel — born, bred, and long dangerously maturing, the Anarchist in action, such as at that period only France produced. Of him his old pro- fessor at the Lycee of Montpellicr had said, after he had led his class-mates into some desperate scrape ^^that is, as such things go in France), "Eleve Villars, 84 The Defence of the East Wing you will either die President of the Council or on the scaffold ; / think the latter ! " He had carried this dangerous reputation to excess as a student, having already been twice imprisoned for the violence of his opinions, by which means he had lost his bourse at the university, and with it his last claim to normal respectability as a provincial lawyer. To do young Villars justice, it was not entirely for selfish enrichment that he desired so greatly to serve himself heir to his father's estates. He had that "conceit of himself" which comes early to a man who can always be sure of making his own living. He knew, however, that whether under empire or any immediate republic, success would be achieved only at the cost of his published and declared con- victions. Whatever, therefore, he could wring from the hated boiirgeoisie would be used to serve " The Cause." True, he had as yet no clear idea what The Cause meant, though in the main he was at one with the men who were plotting the Communist risings in Paris. But meantime, there were certain obvious and cheaply popular cries to which he could attach himself. Such at present was " Death to the Germans ! " This would serve excellently for a siege of Villars Chaumont. He had not been able to bring himself personally to commit murder, even though he felt his quarrel to be just. But in the hither-and-thither of the siege of a defended house, who knew what might not happen .-' Behind those bars was the German, who of a certainty must die for the sake of old Francois, little Louis, and many others. There were, besides, his step-mother and his half-sister, by whose 85 The Men of the Mountain disappearance The Cause would gain greatly. All things were possible at such times. He spoke of the plans he had formed against Villars Chaumont to one, Breslin, whom he had chosen as his second in command. Breslin was a huge, square-shouldered brute, with a kind of rudimentary facility of ruse and trick, much like the instinct of a wild animal evading attack or lying in wait. His great strength made him feared by all that gathering of broken and outlaw men. Yet he yielded at once to the trained intelligence of Ludovic Villars, who became to Breslin as a god, all the more that his skill as a handicraftsman was far beyond that of the forester, trained only in woodcraft and smuggling. " Death to the Prussian ! " The guerilla fighters made that the watchword of their camp in the thin straggling pine-woods above Breuets on the French side. " I have at least got something out of Chaumont yonder," growled the giant Breslin, exhibiting with pride a Red Cross badge and proceeding to buckle it about his arm. He gazed at his loot with a confident smile. " And what good do you think that trinket is going to do you } " demanded his captain scornfully. They lay together, prone on their faces, a little hastily scraped breastwork under their chins, just sufficient to turn a low-flying bullet. They nibbled at what remained of Madame's bread out of their knapsacks, for the enemy was too near for them to risk building a fire ; there would be no soup in the pot that night. 86 The Defence of the East Wing They were on the wrong side of the frontier for any such provender as might have been obtained at Chaumont. " The good it is going to do me ? " chuckled the huge smuggler, " Why, Captain, what need to ask that ? If I am caught by the pigs of Prussians, I will get rid of my gun and cartridge-pouch. Then, look you, I will snap this about my arm, and lo, I am under the protection of the Geneva Convention ! It was a priest who is out with Japy's band, he put me up to the wrinkle." Ludovic Villars laughed scornfully ; then suddenly thrusting out his hand, he pulled his lieutenant's head down with a jerk as a bullet of a needle-gun went ripping past immediately overhead, snipping the smaller branches and bringing down the pine-needles upon them in a thin shower. The men behind growled fiercely, asking to be allowed to reply to the marksman. " No use, lads, it is only some outpost trying the range," Ludovic explained. " I am sure that no one could possibly see us here." And indeed, under the leading of the ex-smuggler, Breslin, they had entered the wood at the top and worked their way down its whole length without stirring a twig, till they were once more looking across the valley in the direction of Chaumont. " There," said Ludovic sternly, " Master Genevan Convention Breslin, where would you have been with that badge on your arm if I, Ludovic Villars, had not pulled that stupid gourd on your shoulders down among the fir-cones ? " ^7 The Men of the Mountain " But I meant when — if, that is, I were taken by the Prussians ! " BresHn explained. " And what, think you, would the Prussians care if you were armour-plated with Swiss badges ? You might just as well stick a dozen Pernod labels over you. They have the red cross also. Why, the first Prussian officer would take one look at your hands, and then, ho, for the peloton of execution and a dozen bullets through your thick skull ! " "But," argued Breslin, "after all, there are worse deaths — ready, present, fire ! That is child's play to what these rascally peasants over yonder would give a man if they caught him at their chicken-coops and rabbit-hutches." " True, Breslin, my most wise friend," said Ludovic, " beating to death with sticks is no cheerful end, neither to be trampled to a jelly with sabots. But, after all, twenty years in a model Swiss dungeon, with no one to speak to, and all the time to be dreaming of the world without, the happy people there, the sunshine, the birds flying across the open sky, and the rabbits bunting about, with their white tails twinkling in the twilight glades — ah, my friend, what think you of that .? " Breslin turned pale, because such things were his life, and he looked anxiously at his commander. " What, then, am I to do .'* " he groaned. " Throw your badge into the bushes there, and if at any time you cannot escape, why, kill as many as you can and then take care to keep the best cartridge for yourself to finish with." He snapped the retaining spring of his revolver and The Defence of the East Wing turned the six cartridges out on his palm. " Observe Number Six," he said grimly ; " that hard-bitten fellow is Ludovic Villars' single ticket to eternity. It will send him, when need is, a long, long journey in the dark, aye, and introduce him to much more than your friend the priest or my brother the parson wots of." But in his heart he was planning, at the first oppor- tunity, a flight to Paris, by way of Lyons. Strange things were being whispered. Some said that Le Grand Soir, the wondrous Eve of Freedom and Universal Revolt, was at hand. Ludovic resolved not to be behindhand. At the first check he would dis- band his men and take the road for Lyons, where he had friends among the leaders of revolt. He knew his own abilities. They would have need of him when they hoisted the Red Rag of the Desperate. No one should be fitter to carry it high than Ludovic Villars. %,> 89 CHAPTER XII. THE SHADOW THAT WALKETH IN DARKNESS PASTOR DAVID ALIX continued his work, and through the lengthening days of spring the whole district of the Jurassic Doubs knew him as its visible Providence. No barque set out from Brenets, or skiff traversed the Bay of Pargots, without a cargo of his bounties. Outlying upland farms, burned and clean- swept, knew him. Behind the shelter of an outhouse, or in lee of a limestone rock, a woman or a hunger- thinned stripling stood on the look-out for Nof Pasteur. In snowy weather his tall form could be seen for miles against the white. Even the Germans tolerated his comings and goings. For was he not the bearer of a laisser passer of unexampled power, with " Von Bismarck " scrawled in one corner and counter-signed "Von Moltke" in the other — the whole bearing the seal of the new " Imperial Chancellerie " ! Not even the Bavarians could help obeying that, as yet, unknown power. When it went from hand to hand among their officers, they fingered it as the devout Roman Catholic does a saintly relic. Yet these were the men the most feared in the country. 90 The Shadow that Walketh The smoke of Bazeilles, the killing of women and children among the flames, had surrounded the scrubbing-brush-crested helmets with that kind of hateful halo which soon becomes a legend of fear. But they saluted David as he went by — even grim, silent, old Van der Tann himself moving his hand upwards as if acknowledging a good soldier of some neutral power. Uhlans galloping rapidly in the twilight would look curiously at the shadow flitting along the forest edges. Then, recognising the " Genevan " pasteur of the lofty protections, they would toss their black and white pennons at him by way of greeting, and vanish at full speed. But in the Chateau-Farm of Villars Chaumont for the moment a great Sabbath quiet rested on every- thing within and without, tempered by the anxiety with which the inmates thought of David walking his dangerous ways across the valley, where the favour ot the Germans brought upon him the suspicion of the more reckless Free Companies. " ' Blessed are the meek ! ' " said Hermann Falk to Noelie, as he sat reclined in the great chair ot the banker — that, indeed, in which he died. He could see David just climbing the hill towards Villars Chaumont — his feet weary with the hard limestone and the long slippery ways. He looked up and waved a hand towards them. Instantly through the window-casement started the little white signal of Noelie's kerchief. She loved her brother, and these two mutually understood each other, as the mother who bore them both never had and never would. 91 The Men of the Mountain " ' Blessed are the meek,' " repeated the Army Chaplain, as his eyes followed his friend's slender figure, " ' they shall inherit the earth.' So the Book says, and for that reason / shall never inherit more than the six foot by two common to all the race." From the window-seat Noelie lifted the misty quiet of her eyes upon him, as he sat, one large strong hand whitened by sickness laid laxly on the arm of her father's great chair. " You are good," she said, with her usual thoughtful directness ; " you are the best patient I have ever nursed — better even than our David. For if he is not watched, he will be up and his clothes on, if one leaves the room for a minute. If you stay away a quarter of an hour, )^ou will likely catch sight of him half-way down to the ferry at Chaillaxon ! But you have been content ! " "Yes," said the Military Chaplain, very gravely, and without looking at his nurse, " I have been content." The girl flushed a little with pleasure, though indeed he had spoken rather brusquely. Then she threw a light fly-line with maidenly cunning, to catch a greater compliment. " Of course," she said softly, as if to herself, " I have not nursed you as your own mother would have done " The Chaplain laughed aloud. "Thank goodness," he said. "My mother would have plastered me and pottaged me every five minutes by the clock. There would have been no rest for my body because of her remedies, nor for my 92 The Shadow that Walketh soul because of her tongue. She has not had a chance at me like this for twenty years — not since my first duel at Heidelberg, when I fought the Captain of the Badeners." " A duel — you — and a clergyman ? " Somehow Noelie's eyes were shining, though her words were reproachful. " Ah, dear lady," smiled the Chaplain, " not one, but twenty. It is part of the curriculum. Not a professor worth anything but will show you his battle- scars between his second and third tumblers — aye, and be proud of them too ! " " But were you then studying for the ministry of the Word .'' " asked Noelie, the memory of the young Protestant students she had seen at Montauban coming back to her. She could see them walking singly with their books under the great trees of the Cka7iss^e, or in quiet twos and threes taking the air in the college garden — all gentle, still of demeanour, quiet of speech — not at all like this Goth of the North, who in spite of being a minister duly ordained, had the speech of a commander of horse and carried on his shoulders the head of a Viking. David entered, and stood on the threshold a moment smiling at the two before him — Noelie on the window- seat, her hands on her lap, and Hermann Falk in the banker's chair, looking strange in his bandages, with the weathered " hale " all gone from his face. Only with David did Noelie ever show her real spontaneity of character. She rose and ran to him, eager as when she was still a child, to clasp her hands about his neck. He kissed her gently on the fore- 93 The Men of the Mountain nead, looking down upon her from his height with the gentlest eyes. Then, without moving, he reached out his hand to Hermann Falk in his chair, " Has this baby of ours been taking good care of you ? " he asked, as Noelie went off to get him some- thing to eat. The kitchen was now more free of strange guests. The great " sweep " of the Germans had carried the bands before them northward, while the lurking solitary fighters had followed behind, furtively gliding from tree to tree till they could again come near enough to harass the enemy's rearguard and outposts. The country opposite Villars Chaumont was, for a little while, quiet. Only many farms were laid waste or plundered. Fugitives still lurked in all the woods. Women starved in the villages. David had seen all this that day, but once at home his care and his love were for those he had left there. Gravely he counted the beats of the Chaplain's pulse, asked what the surgeon had said that day as to his wound, and sat down beside him, to give him, what Hermann Falk so earnestly desired the latest news of the war. There was an armistice — so much was certain. And though that did not yet include the disturbed departments of the Doubs and Jura, assuredly that also would not be long delayed. There would be peace, glorious for the Germans, and perhaps on as good terms as the French had any right to expect. " Ah," said Hermann Falk, " there speaks the Switzer ! What would your mother say to this } " 94 The Shadow that Walketh << I know — I know," David Alix answered sadly. " She thinks of her Alsace — I of my poor folk down yonder " David sighed and was silent a moment, looking out of the window at the rugged ledges of the Franche Comte above Chaillaxon. " I suppose I Mft a bad patriot to my adopted country," he said pensively. " If it be possible for a man like you to conceive such a thing, Hermann, I am a man who prefers the poorest peace to the best war that was ever waged ! " The Military Chaplain was not at all so deeply moved as David had expected. " You forget," he said, " that I have seen you stuck up against a cottage wall over there at Mouthe " " Ah," David interrupted, " that was in the way of my duty. That is ver}' different. It is easy to die. It is hard to kill your fellow-men, whom God has made, in a quarrel of kings and emperors ! '' "Your own folk did not think so over yonder at Morat, some little time ago ! Nay, they were so fond of fighting that after they had no enemies left to conquer at home, they took sen-ice with every king who had a sack of dollars, and every tyrant who wanted a faithful guard." "I know," said David Alix. '"No money, no Swiss ' — the proverb has run round the world. Only such men did not come from my city, which is Geneva, nor carry in their hearts the faith of m}^ Master, who is •" "John C'Jvin," interrupted the Military Chaplain. "Why, man, more wars have been waged because of The Men of the Mountain that master of yours than by all the kings, emperors, and princes now upon the earth ! " " I did not mean John Calvin, Hermann Falk," said the Pastor, " as well you do know. But vour Master and mine." The Military Chaplain moved uneasily. His religion, equally real and deep, did not express itself so easily as David's. " Ah ! " he exclaimed, .startled as if David had used a rough camp word—" yes, I understand. I beg your pardon, Pastor David." Secretly he felt that between men who knew each other so well — as it were both of them spiritual experts — his jest should not have been put down with such a hammer-stroke of authority. But Hermann was the last man in the world to bear malice. He was a German with strong patriotic feelings. He considered that the cause of his Emperor- King was also the cause of God. But he was his friend's guest, and it mattered little to him though David Alix was, what he often called him, a mere Republican, or that he seemed to think that the Bible consisted only of the Scriptures of the New Testament. Accordingly he changed the subject. "Any news of our kind friends the 'bush-whackers'?" he said. It was now David's turn to show a certain uneasiness. He looked out of the window and drummed his thin fingers on the table. Hermann, who knew him of old, watched him, smiling quietly. " Well, what is it .'' Out with it, my David," he said. " I fear," said the Pastor at last, " that the bloody 96 The Shadow that Walketh and deceitful men are again on our track. To-day, as I came from Lazon to Les Collines, I felt that I was not alone. The feeling haunted me till it became an obsession. Always, behind dykes and hedges of willow and thorn, something glided. I have had the feeling before, when returning by night, but never in broad daylight. Hitherto he has been the shadow that walketh in darkness, but to-day I saw him under God's own sun." " And could you make the fellow out — the rascal ? " growled the Army Chaplain fiercely between his teeth. " It was the man who calls himself the son of my mother's husband — Ludovic Villars. I saw him spying me as I went my rounds, and once when I stopped and walked back towards him, he disappeared into the thickets of the woods of Vercel." "Would that I had been at his tail," groaned Hermann Falk from the banker's great chair, " or Sergeant Schram — he is the better shot. He would have tickled your good kinsman, I warrant." " I desire no man's hurt," said David, " not even when he desires mine." " No," cried the Military Chaplain vehemently, " I dare say not. But you are not such a fool as to think that it is yoii he is after — no, nor even me, the Prussian. I am only the bait in the trap. He will gain nothing by killing either of us. He would lose his popularity by slaying you. But if your sister and your mother were killed in the tumult of an assault by night on this hospital of mine — why, who would be the heir ? " "He could never be so wicked," cried David. 97 H The Men of the Mountain " Such a monster does not exist in any Christian country." The Chaplain shrugged his shoulders. " A Christian country," he said. " It looks like it over yonder, does it not .-' Your people and mine have not too many stones to cast one at the other — but we Germans at least do our killing regularly and in order of battle." " But I was shot at," said David ; " therefore he must wish to kill me also. I heard the bullet whistle overhead, and saw the puff of smoke rise from among the bushes." " I wager there is something behind all that," mused Hermann Falk. " I wish I had my pipe, so that I could think things out." " And why not .-• " said David. " Wait a moment. I can bring you one of my stepfather's, and there is good tobacco among my mother's stores, I know." " Hush," murmured the Chaplain, raising his hand and listening eagerly, " there is Noelie's step on the stairs. She does not like tobacco." And for the first time for many days David, remem- bering his friend of old, laughed aloud. CHAPTER XIII. THE COMMANDANT ALICE BRANTE, schoolmistress at Les Pargots, a certain little, ringleted, pouting-lipped girl, with the eyes of a Persian cat in the twilight, some- thing between the blue and the grey, though born in France, was a ver>^ different patriot from her neigh- bour, La Petite Flore, across the lake. But it was to her official cottage, overlooking the water-lily beds of the Bay of Pargots, that La Petite Flore had brought her mother for a few days after the shooting of Hermann Falk at Villars Chaumont. The house had once been a small smuggling inn, frequented by the " runners " of watches and Swiss jewellery, in the days before Henri Villars had come from Provence to organise and centralise the trade further up the lake. The place had been officially reconstructed, but still possessed its original two doors, the front being in French territory, wdiile the back opened out upon the green pastures of Switzerland. This little schoolmistress was also a pastor's daughter, born in the next parish to that in which David's father had done his ministrations. Left early an orphan, she had been gathered in by the good man 99 H 2 The Men of the Mountain and his wife, though by the latter with something of an ill grace. Nevertheless, she had received and educated the little orphan girl until the death of David Alix the elder changed all things. Then the Provengal banker declared that he would not have his house turned into an orphan asylum. He was willing, he added, to do anything in reason for the pretty little Protestant, but it must be at a distance from Villars Chaumont. Henri Villars was as good as his word, and placed Alice Brante in a good school at Lausanne, from which in due time she went to the Normal College for Government instructors at Geneva, She was ever an affectionate little girl, with hair of copper and pale gold. Her face was set in tight little curls which had this peculiarity — where they sprang from the fair under skin, they appeared of a deep copper hue which gradually lightened to the upper curve, but beyond that they fell like little waves on a quiet shore, in arch ringlets and sprays, which foamed on her brow in pale amber gold, so light that the wind lifted and laid them with every breath, or even the mere movement she made in walking. Madame up yonder at Villars Chaumont had never liked her, though she had not yet shown herself openly hostile. But David had always regarded Alice a? his little sister, and often found his way to the door of the white school-house under the great chestnuts, with the Bay of Pargots and the broadest part of the lake stretching out under the westward- looking windows. Beneath was a floating plain of lOO The Commandant water-lilies, anchored in masses, moored by their thick green cables like some fairy fleet lying becalmed witt all sail set. When the gusts came hard from the westward they rolled and swayed like merchantmen outside a river bar. But when it was still, as mostly at this perfect season of the year, then beginning with the white fringe of the Bay of Pargots, the eye took in a wonderful scheme of colour. Alice had often tried to fix it on paper with her poor cheap colours — hard gritty cakes rubbed down on slabs of china ware — the whole supplied by the Cantonal Government for the purpose of colouring maps. But she never got half-way through without disaster. She stamped her little foot at herself as at a stupid scholar, tore up the result, and clattered the materials topsy- turvy into a drawer. For mademoiselle sometimes was a stormy little person, for all her meek airs, as the pupils who aroused her soon found out. Alice Brante stood at her door, wondering whether she should go a-visiting, but she soon fell a-dreaming over the beauty spread before her. The white of the lilies in the Bay of Pargots dropped suddenly at the water's edge into a pale blue, which became darker as it receded, till between the capes it was a mere deep sapphire line with little wave-flecks of fire upon it. Beyond, Alice saw a marvel, as it had been a huge emerald with a glowing heart of yellow fire. It was the Lake of Brenets on its couch of Jura lime- stone, with the sunshine plunging darts of flame into it, searching out its depths. Only in these lakes of the high Jura can such a thing be seen. This, of course, little Alice did not know. She had lOI The Men of the Mountain only seen the great Lake Leman, stretching every way beneath Lausanne, blue or grey according to the sky above it. That was her ocean, and though she knew that the sea of the geographies was larger, she really could not imagine it without the Alps of Savoy rising abruptly on the other side. Behind her, the little house was cool and sweet, while through its soft duskiness stole airs from across the tableland of the French Jura. Alice, the little schoolmistress, sighed. Indeed, she had had her share of the anxieties of war. The elder children of Les Pargots had with one mind stayed away from school — the boys employed in running mysterious messages and the girls helping their mothers with the extra cooking, which somehow or other arose out of these missions on which their brothers were despatched. " To think," said Alice pitifully to herself, " that the Inspector of the Educational Committee will be here in a month, and not more than a dozen scholars of the ' Grands ' ready to meet him. If it were not for the little ones, I should certainly get a bad mark on my certificate. But if he is a kind man, he will look at the register of attendances — then he will understand, I cannot teach children who will not come to be taught." There was certainly some slight comfort in this thought, but all the same the great eyes with the dark pupils, which waxed and waned according to the light, were often velvet-soft with tears. The little school-house on the frontier, where the Doubs sways away into the " Franche Compte," almost abuttea on the Mountain of Grillot, a rough 102 The Commandant mountain-shoulder, round the corner, as it were, from the main valley. It afforded a safe refuge, in ordinary times, for Free Fighters and " solitaries "— chiefl\- because the German patrols and columns of punish- ment had to cross the Doubs in order to reach it, and only a strong or very mobile force would venture to leave a deep and difficult river between them and retreat. In itself the cottage above Les Pargots did not seem a very safe place of abode for a girl, young and innocent, in times so uncertain. But Alice, the little schoolmistress, was not really alone. The stables of the ancient inn had been converted into a farm- dwelling, and though one end of the school-house abutted on the pines of the mountain side, the dwelling of Jean Heller and his wife Anna held Alice's cottage in a friendly embrace of corn-sheds and hay-chalets which surrounded it on three sides. Jean Heller was an old soldier. He had made the Solferino campaign, and, as a recruit, that of the Crimea also. He was of the department of the Isere, near to Grenoble, and like many of his countryfolk, a Protestant. But at the close of his service he had retired with the grade of sergeant-major, to marry a Swiss wife and to cultivate the farm she had brought him. Long a naturalised citizen of the Swiss Republic, he had thought little more of the Isere, and though he daily saw his native land, he had had, till this last year, little desire to revisit it. His own people were all dead. He was perfectly happy with Anna, his plump, red-cheeked wife, whom it was his humour to treat in military fashion, calling her " Commandant " ic^3 The Men of the Mountain at every other word, and when he went or came, pre- tending to stand at attention, and saluting seriously and with ceremony as often as she made her will known. At first Anna had not understood this pleasantry, and many had been the pitched battles which she had fought, because he would thus persist in making her ridiculous " bef®re people." But Jean held to his point and gradually won. By degrees Anna habituated herself to her husband's extraordinary humour, and even in her heart excused him by saying that, after all, his hardships might have left something very much worse in his system. Finally all thought of anything strange passed away, so much so that Madame Heller often wondered what strangers were laughing at when they came first about the farm of Les Bassettes. As they had no children, the little schoolmistress had become to this well-matched pair almost as their own child. They had often besought her to come across the court to their house. But there was a Governmental rule not to be trifled with, which bade the teachers to inhabit the houses allotted to them by the Confederation, to keep such residences in good repair, and on no account to let, sublet, or otherwise alienate them, for any period however short. Alice, therefore, had always declined the good Hellers' offers to dwell with them. But Jean, not to be beaten, made use of his talent for carpentry, and with some hundreds of old pine boards constructed a covered passage which ran from the eastern door of the school- house, through the great barn, turned the angle of a fodder shed, and thence by a door straight into the 104 The Commandant kitchen-place of Les Bassettes. ' This same secret passage pleased him greatly. He was proud of it and induced even the hasty tongue of Madame Anna to keep silence about it. His corn and hay were piled up against the planking, and no one in the house- hold, looking through the great doors of the barn, could have the least idea of the covered way which lay underneath the yellow mounds of rustling straw and lavender-scented hay. Both Jean and Anna took a pride in the thought that the lonely little school- mistress was in some degree their guest, and had a part in their house, in spite of the Government and all its regulations. " Faith o' my heart," said Anna Heller, cleaning a long stirring-spoon on her aproned knee, " she must stay in her own house, must she .■' By herself — all these long winter nights ! The man in Berne who made that law should be stuck up here all alone, with nothing but six feet of snow-drift and a map of Siberia to keep him warm — then he might learn how to make laws ! " " Yet I dare wager. Commandant," said her husband, mechanically saluting, " there are not a few in these valleys who would be glad to come and bear our little Alice company of an evening about the lonely fire, or hear her sing " "Alice Brante is too good a girl to think of any such foolishness," interrupted his wife, " and I beg that you shall not put it into her head. Besides, she is too proud ! She thinks a great deal of herself — and rightly. Her book, her knitting, and her piano — what more does she want .'' " The Men of the Mountain Here the ex-soldier interrupted humbly, with the sign agreed upon between them when he wished to address a remark personal to his superior officer. " Go on," cried Anna, giving him an impatient slap as she passed, " never was there such a man ! He does not know what he would be at, and yet he is for ever troubling us with this nonsense of saluting. Hands down, I tell you, and out with what you want to say ! " Jean saluted again, but the long wooden stirring- spoon made a motion in the direction of his head. He knew better than to hesitate. " It seems to me," he said, in a distant, reminiscent tone, playing meanwhile with a chip that had fallen from the hearth, and letting the words slowly distil themselves from his lips, " that, some time long ago, I can remember a girl who did not object to a little company of an evening sitting in the chimney-corner of her father's house, not remote from here, listening to the crickets chirp, and the yet sweeter melody of the old man snoring stoutly in his closet with the door open " The wooden spoon fell this time on Jean's bushy head and about his shoulders, neither of which he tried in the least to shield. Only at each resounding thump, his hand rose to his brow with unfailing submission, and when she had finished his punishment, he said without a single flicker of a smile on his grave face, " Thank you, my commandant ! " At which the buxom woman, flushed with hei exertions, was compelled, in spite of herself, to laugh. Then suddenly she flung herself at her husband, 1 06 The Commandant catching him by the ears, crjnng out that of all men he was the most impossible, teasing, villainous, and delightful. For an instant Jean threw aside his mask of soldierly obedience, caught his wife by the waist, and whirled her round the kitchen in a wild dance, from which the good woman emerged red and breath- less, catching at her decent white headgear, and pushing at vagrant curls to stow them out of sight underneath. " Have you no sense, Jean, at your age } You ought to know better. Just look at me — I pray of you to regard well. And what would any one have thought had they seen you .<* " " Why, that you were lucky in your choice of a husband, Anna Heller ! " cried her husband. " Be off with you, I say ! " She caught at the bar of iron, with a hook at the end, by means of which the fire was kept in order and various matters stowed away up in the chimney to be out of harm's way. " Come a little nearer, lad, and I will comb thy locks for thee ! " she cried. " I will have no more of this. Mademoiselle Alice may come through that door at any moment ! " A peal of laughter, with a little nightingale's ju^^- jiig deep in the throat, broke off the sentence — a laugh which often made those who heard it start and turn to look at Alice Brante. " I have been watching }-ou all the time," she said, running to Madame Anna ; and then compassionately, " Has he been naughty again .'' " " Naughty — that is no word for him," cried the 107 The Men of the Mountain housewife, holding up her hands ; " I am fairly wearied to death with his foolishness." " Yet it seemed to me that you also were laughing?" " And, I pray you, who could help it ? " cried Madame, still intent on her damaged cap of fine white muslin trimmed with batiste. " He does not play fair, look you, that Jean. He has learned in some ill company to keep his face straight, and laugh not at all, or maybe he is too lean to laugh. And — ah, I cannot help it, do you see } For I am fat. He is a rascal, a good-for-nothing, and why I married him at all I cannot make out to this day ! " Jean's hand went up. " Well, what is it } " said his wife. " Be serious for once — before Mademoiselle ! " " Why you married me, my commandant," said Jean reflectively, " t/imt I cannot tell. But well do I know why I married you ! " " And why } " demanded Anna, making another demonstration with the long-handled wooden spoon. " Because, my commandant, you ordered me ! " said Jean, gravely saluting. The spoon would doubtless have fallen again, and perhaps the hooked bar of iron as well (though that not with much deadly force, you may be sure). But Alice begged her friend off, and pacified and delighted both combatants by declaring that at her house she had not a crumb of anything, and that in her need she had come to ask them for a bite of supper. Instantly all was changed in the mood of the farmer and his wife of Les Bassettes. Their mock quarrel- io8 The Commandant someness, these simple innocent jests of the country- side, which in these last days Jean had forced himself to wear almost threadbare in order to keep up his spirits, passed instantly away. Jean busied himself with the fuel for the fire, and went down to the cellar for a bottle of country wine out of his own vineyard. Anna paid visits to her pantry and bustled with pots and pans about the fireplace. Like all the women of the Swiss Jura, she had a natural gift of cookery. A pleasant place was the kitchen of the farm of Bassettes on that summer night. The heat of the charcoal on the hearth was rather pleasant than otherwise at that altitude. It was dusk, and they lighted no light, because of the midges and flies. But the table was laid near the open window. The great doors were flung wide, and from where they sat they could look down into the deepening shadows purpling in the pale glitter of the bassins. These were now dimmed with a milky iris of mist, but white houses looked out clearly enough here and there on the favoured slopes of that peaceful land. The bare summits to the west, however, were red as blood, as the sun went down on the wreck of what had once been one of the fairest provinces of that dear land where Jean had been born. They fell silent in the twilight, not eating much, but all struck by one thought. At the sound of a foot- step at the door, however, Jean started up. It was a time when no man heard the fall of foot, whether of man or beast, without at once setting himself to find out the cause. 109 The Men of the Mountain " The blessing of the God of Jacob be on this house and on all that are in it ! " They knew the voice, as who did not. Heartily they cried to come in. Smilingly Jean brought a chair, and his wife set the table for another place, as David Alix entered, a kind of gladness on his pale face. They set him between them, with Alice, grown suddenly rather silent, opposite, her head silhouetted against the opaline light of the doorway. " You will abide and take the worship with us, Pastor ! " said Jean. " I will abide," David Alix answered, as he took his seat. He had disposed his great game-bag in a corner. The wallet was flat and empty now, though in the morning he had crossed the lake with it too full for the straps to buckle about it. " And you, little sister .-• " he asked, looking across the table to Alice Brante, " has your flock teased you as much as mine to-day .-' " He could not see the expression on her face, for she had her back to the misty light which filled the valleys, but she answered readily enough. " Pastor, my work is little and foolish compared to yours. You give bread to the hungry. You speak the Word. You lead the suffering heavenward. You prepare the dying. Yours is the greatest work to which any man could put hands — and I wonder that any dare ! " " Indeed," said the Pastor, sighing, " such is my own daily wonder. I feel that I am even as that Uzzah who, at the threshing-floor of Nachon, did put forth his hand and touch the ark of God when the oxen no The Commandant shook it. I marvel that I am not stricken even as he." And they looked on him open-mouthed, for all in that land on both sides of the bassins considered him as holy. \i he were a sinner, how would it fare with the others .-' As they sat silent, waiting upon his words, there came through the open door the hoot of an owl out of the darkness of the pine-forest that scrambled up the mountain. Jean, whose keen ear detected that the sound came from nothing that wore feathers, made as if to rise, but the Pastor stretched out his hand and bade him keep his seat. " All is well," he said, smiling quietly, " it is only my invisible protector." And because David Alix had borne what seemed a charmed life during these months of storm and death, a thrill of awe fell upon all three as the hoot of the owl came again, thrice repeated, from the wood. iir CHAPTER XIV. THE EVENING SACRIFICE IN the Doubs and the Jura the disturbance among the people lasted longer than elsewhere in France. In those early summer days of 1871, when the great struggle against the Commune was going on about Paris, these two frontier departments were, and had to be, a law to themselves. The Germans had retreated to the north. The soldiers and " Mobiles " of the district were assisting M. Thiers to bring the stubborn workmen of Belleville and Montmartre to their senses — and to the camp of Sartory. Debris of broken armies, plunderers, and vulturine followers of battle-fields, deserters of all arms. Communists and terrorists fleeing from the great towns of Lyons or Marseilles when the Red Flag had failed, or in- surgents too late to gain entrance into Paris — swarmed everywhere, and became the curses of the two Jurassic departments. It was no wonder, therefore, that David Alix needed divine protection in his work of aiding the helpless on both sides of the bassins and upon the cable-lands of the Doubs. He had, however, learned by this time that the Shadow that Walked in Darkness 112 The Evening Sacrifice was, to him, beneficent — though he did not yet know the extent of the debt he owed to that faithful guard. As they sat in the kitchen of the farmhouse of Les Bassettes, the Pastor, Jean Heller, and his wife Anna, with the little schoolmistress Alice demurely knitting with swift flickerings of shining needles, the men fell to talking of the state of anarchy in which the country had been left. Jean severely blamed the Federal Government for having withdrawn the troops which had been raised at the time of the surrender of Clinchant, with the remainder of Bourbaki's unfortunate army of the East. " They ought not to have left us without protection. There is not a soldier nearer than Berne, or a police- man than Lochle or Chaux-Fonds ! " To this the Pastor agreed, but represented that it was not easy for a country like Switzerland to keep an army in the field merely to do police duty. "A state ought to protect its citizens — that at least," said Jean, with his grim campaigning face upon him. " However," he continued, " I am less to be pitied than many others. I can protect myself, and it will go ill with any rascals who come across the water to steal my cattle." The women sat silent, a little awed by the seriousness of the men's conversation. Suddenly Madame Anna asked the Pastor if he had seen any plunderers that day. " Only one," he said. " Poor fellow, he was dangling from the branch of a tree ! " " Good ! " said Jean, who, in his quality of disciplined soldier, had no pity for unlicensed marauders. " Where did you find him ? " 113 I The Men of the Mountain " At C6tes above Morteau," said the Pastor ; " they are forming defensive societies there now. The patrols are riding, and all over the roads I heard the beating of their horses' feet. One of their captains, a country gentleman of Le Lac, thrust his head in at the door of a cottage where a few of our poor folk had met for worship, and took down the names of all present. He asked the women where their husbands were, what their sons were doing, and after comparing their answers with what I was able to tell him out- side, he called on his men and rode on his way." Jean Heller, once viart'chal-of-the-logis, nodded his head with complete approval. He knew what such police work meant in a country disturbed by war. " Yes," he said, " they are dividing the sheep from the goats. They must know who are honestly occupied, and who living by rapine ! Then their task will be easy." " May God make them merciful to any poor souls who have been led astray ! " said the little school- mistress compassionately. The Pastor turned to her quickly and held out his hand. " Well said, little one," he cried, the light of the love he bore for all the weak and sinful of the earth glorifying his countenance with a certain far-off suggestion of the radiance of his Master's upon the mount. " I also pray that these mistaken ones may return to the fold. But how shall one convert a sinner if he be hanged .'' " Jean shook his head. He knew that the men who attacked houses, terrified weak women, plundered 114 ti i The Evening Sacrifice farms and byres, set fire to the good corn gathered into barn, only to wreak their idle vengeance and love of mischief, were not to be converted by patience and long-suffering — hardly even by the grace of God. He was heart and soul with the men who in town and country were banding themselves to restore order. However, he did not say that to David Alix. As a lord of flocks and herds, Jean Heller knew that it was a vain and dangerous thing to let the trapped wolf off with an admonition in a land of sheepfolds. " There is, however, one piece of good news," the Pastor continued ; " the band which lay in the wood opposite to my mother's house is broken up. The man who calls himself Ludovic Villars has disappeared. The jMorteau men raided it last night, and I fear that that man I saw was one of the poor wretches whom they captured." " It may be somewhat fortunate for your mother and sister, however," said Jean. " They were a dangerous lot — that Villars gang ! I knew Breslin the smith, and if the rope be about his neck, the justice of man has fallen upon no innocent victim." Meanwhile the night had closed in. Madame Anna busied herself with her household affairs, the washing of dishes and the like, with little clinkings of glass and subdued clattering of china. In this pleasant familiar bustle the little schoolmistress bore her part. The men continued to talk and the women to listen, as was indeed proper when such serious things were being discussed. Jean took it upon himself to advise the Pastor to go armed while these dangerous days lasted. His life was too precious, he said. They 115 I 2 The Men of the Mountain could not do without him, and for the sake of the whole neighbourhood it was his duty to preserve so precious a life. " If the Lord have need of me, He will preserve me," said David ; " moreover, to speak even according to your own prudence, Jean Heller, I am safer as it is. Did He not save my life once already when the breach- blocks of the German rifles were clicked down and the muzzles pointed ? And where would I have been now, if Von Hartmann had found a loaded pistol in my coat pocket ? As it was, I was nearly shot for carrying a dozen rolls of bread ! " This was so just that Jean could not answer it. " At any rate, keep to the daylight," he persisted ; " at night the outlaws might not even know who you were. And to-night you will permit me to take my rifle and escort you home." "Not so, good Jean," said the Pastor; "see, I have my guard all ready ! " Then rising, he clapped his hands three times at the open door, and from the wood, now drowned in the deepest shadow, came back three times the hoot of an owl. All who were there, except the man thus provided with the unseen escort, felt a thrill of superstitious terror run chill down their backs. Only David was calm and smiling. " I do not know who or what it may be that thus protects me ; but this I know, it is sent of the Lord and must work His will. Madame Heller, shall we prepare to worship God ? " The good wife of the house of Les Bassettes Ii6 The Evening Sacrifice laid aside her domestic duties, washed and wiped her hands, with the care of one who is about to take part in holy things. She then went to a little cup- board in the wall, shut with an ancient square door of carven oak. Opening it, she took out an old Genevan Bible in the French language, bound in calf-skin, with the black coarse outside hair worn shiny and thin. This she placed before the Pastor. Jean sat straight in his chair, his military stiffness softened by a sudden tenderness. His wife placed herself by his side, her hands folded in a white napkin on her knee, as was her wont when hearing her pastor preach in church. For the first time the little schoolmistress lifted her eyes to those of David Alix. The lamp which Anna Heller had lighted shone with brightness on his pale, clear-cut features, which had once been ruddy as those of the other young David. His hair fell upon his brow, and he tossed it back with a little motion that was habitual to him. There was now no danger that Alice should encounter the Pastor's gaze — that mild, gentle, brooding gaze, still as a Sabbath morn, which dwelt on the face of his neighbour, as if it could see through the veil of flesh deep into the soul. Instinctively of late years Alice Brante had avoided those eyes of David Alix. She told herself that she was not worthy. She seemed to herself light and frivolous in the face of so much self-devotion. The memory of certain innocent passages with this young fellow and that other — she would have called them " flirtations " if the word had at that date penetrated to the Jura — how a certain Alexandre Parny of Lausanne had carried 117 The Men of the Mountain her little black trunk from the station to her boarding- house all the way on his shoulder ; how Franz Baumann of Zurich had brought her a packet of " edelweiss " after an excursion in the great Alps, and had begged for one of his own blossoms back again as a souvenir — how she had given it to him. And then, worst of all, there was the young English tourist who had lost his way, and to whom she had served tea in hei arbour outside instead of bringing him in to Madame Anna. No, of a surety, she was not worthy, few, simple, and childishly innocent as her souvenirs were. Yet as she looked at David turning over with love and reverent familiarity the pages of the old family Bible which had survived so many storms of per- secution and the threatened fires of so many edicts, her heart warmed. Assuredly it was good to watch such a man. " Let us worship God," said David Alix, and in a low thrilling voice he began to read out the psalm : " Whoso dwelleth in the secret of the Most High Shall abide in the shadow of the Almighty : I will say unto the Lord, ' O mine hope and my for- tress ! ' He is my God — in Him will I trust. " Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night Nor of the arrow that fiieth by day, Nor of the pestilence that walketh in the darkness, Nor of the plague that destroyeth at noonday. " There shall none evil come unto thee, Neither shall any plague come near thy tabernacle : For He shall give His angels charge over thee, To keep thee in all thy ways."' Tt8 ' IX A LOW THKILI.ING VOICE HE BEGAN TO READ OUT THE PSALM.' The Evening Sacrifice The psalm was sung to a well-known Huguenot chant as old as Clement Marot. Doubtless That which was in the wood heard the uplifted voices, and ii a good spirit, it stood still to listen — perhaps even drew near to partake. After that a chapter was read, the Fourteenth of John, dear to David Alix not only for its own sake, but because, of all the chapters of the Bible, it was that most connected with Scotland — the words coming back to him sanctified by the memory of many com- munion seasons, of some Christian deathbeds — because it was the page he had found oftenest open by the pillow of the bedridden, or in the hand of the afflicted and the bereaved. And so in the midst of the great surrounding un- certainty he read the chapter now. The winds off the mountain ruffled the leaves of the ancient quarto of Geneva. He laid his hand upon the top edges to hold them down. Then for the first time Alice noted that a thin stream of blood was trickling down his sleeve. She could hardly keep herself from instantly rising up with the cry, " David, David, you are hurt ! " as she would have done in the days when he was a brave and gentle young lad coming home from college and she a little trotting girl, wading knee-deep among the daisies. But just then the words of final command cam.e from his lips as he closed the book, and kneeline. laid his clasped hands upon the rough, untanned, calf-skin leather. '' Let lis pray !" And he prayed that the souls of all present might 119 The Men of the Mountain be clean and clear, washed in the fountain of true holiness, which is Jesus Christ. He prayed for the weak and erring, for those led sadly astray, serving the devil when they ought to serve their country. He prayed for peace and the coming of that love upon the world which is the spirit of Jesus Christ. He pleaded for themselves — for strength to be strong and long-suffering and gentle. And last of all, he prayed that their sins might be forgiven, in the measure and according to the spirit in which they themselves forgave their enemies. And to this they said " Amen " with one voice, and so, with strange exalted hearts, arose from their knees. The sacrifice of the lips, which in this case was also the sacrifice of the heart, was ended. T20 M CHAPTER XV. BRESLIN THE SMITH \S soon as David Alix and his host appeared in the doorway which looks towards the moun- tain, a dark figure fled silently back into the covert of the forests that descend almost to the walls of Les Bassettes. Coming out of the lighted room the two men could see nothing. Even had they been close by, it is to be doubted if they could have made out more than they had seen from the doorstep. But it chanced that the little schoolmistress, terrified by the wound of which David had made so little, had darted along the passage behind the fodder-mows which Jean had constructed for her, back to her own chamber. She was in time to catch such a glimpse of the figure that scudded noiselessly to cover as was possible under the uncertain light of a moonless and cloud-veiled sky. Those fine eyes, with their elastic pupils, had not been given her in vain. Somehow at night it always appeared to her much lighter than to other people. She saw all obstacles in the path, even on the darkest night. She went forward fearlessly, perhaps not so much actually seeing as divining the path. To-night she saw- clearly the dark figure standing at the wall of the little I 21 The Men of the Mountain orchard, the head leaning forward, and what looked like a ragged cloak gathered about the head and shoulders. The face could not be seen, owing to the shadow of the cowl, and also because the man held a part of his cloak before his face. But Alice Brante could make out the glint of light along the rifle barrel, and what she knew to be a cartridge bag belted about his waist. A moment more, and the vision had disappeared. He did not run or walk or use any ordinary method of locomotion. He simply disappeared as instantly and completely as if he had sunk into the ground. Then after a pause, from the depths of the wood, there came first three clear calls of the owl, and again, as if the bird had flown farther, three more, faint and more distant. David Alix clapped his hands to signify his departure to his mysterious guide. Then he saluted his host and strode away across the rough, torrent-seamed brow of the fells in the direction of Villars Chaumont. Alice felt her heart beat strongly. She saw his figure disappear, staff in hand, the shoulders a little bent, as was his custom when walking fast. And her prayers pursued the best man in the world, as, not without reason, the Pastor of the Doubs Valley appeared to her. Then with a faint cry she held her breath. For lo ! in the opaline mist which even in the darkness brooded over the lake, she saw the Shadow. It passed across the glade, with head far forward, long locks that fell on the cowl which had now been pushed back upon the shoulders in order to hear better, gun in hand, silent and deadly in pursuit as one of those Indians on the 122 Breslin the Smith trail in those precious volumes of Fenimore Cooper which she had read on the sly at college. Alice, the little schoolmistress, could hardl)- keep herself from cr\'in