“‘Well,’ I replied, ’as you
approve of this vengeance, prepare to endure it.’
“‘I do not fear it.’
“And in fact she did not seem to have lost courage.
Her face was calm, and she looked at me without trembling,
while I brought wood and dried leaves together, and
feverishly threw on to them the powder from some cartridges,
which was to make her funeral pile the more cruel.
“I hesitated in my thoughts of persecution for
a moment. But the captain was there, pale and
covered with blood, and he seemed to be looking at
me with his large, glassy eyes, and I applied myself
to my work again after kissing his pale lips.
Suddenly, however, on raising my head, I saw that
she was crying, and I felt rather surprised.
“‘So you are frightened?’ I said
to her.
“’No, but when I saw you kiss your husband,
I thought of mine, of all whom I love.’
“She continued to sob, but stopping suddenly,
she said to me in broken words and in a low voice:
“‘Have you any children?’
“A shiver rare over me, for I guessed that this
poor woman had some. She asked me to look in
a pocketbook which was in her bosom, and in it I saw
two photographs of quite young children, a boy and
a girl, with those kind, gentle, chubby faces that
German children have. In it there were also two
locks of light hair and a letter in a large, childish
hand, and beginning with German words which meant:
“’My dear little mother.
“’I could not restrain my tears, my dear
friend, and so I untied her, and without venturing
to look at the face of my poor dead husband, who was
not to be avenged, I went with her as far as the inn.
She is free; I have just left her, and she kissed
me with tears. I am going upstairs to my husband;
come as soon as possible, my dear friend, to look for
our two bodies.’”
I set off with all speed, and when I arrived there
was a Prussian patrol at the cottage; and when I asked
what it all meant, I was told that there was a captain
of francs-tireurs and his wife inside, both dead.
I gave their names; they saw that I knew them, and
I begged to be allowed to arrange their funeral.
“Somebody has already undertaken it,”
was the reply. “Go in if you wish to, as
you know them. You can settle about their funeral
with their friend.”
I went in. The captain and his wife were lying
side by side on a bed, and were covered by a sheet.
I raised it, and saw that the woman had inflicted
a similar wound in her throat to that from which her
husband had died.
At the side of the bed there sat, watching and weeping,
the woman who had been mentioned to me as their best
friend. It was the lancer’s wife.
There was not a sound in the forest save the indistinct,
fluttering sound of the snow falling on the trees.
It had been snowing since noon; a little fine snow,
that covered the branches as with frozen moss, and
spread a silvery covering over the dead leaves in the
ditches, and covered the roads with a white, yielding
carpet, and made still more intense the boundless
silence of this ocean of trees.
