第47章

Sara Lee replied, then, in smothered English: "He is gone, Marie.He will never come back.""Who can tell? There are many missing who are not dead."Sara Lee shuddered.For spies were not made prisoners.They had no rights as prisoners of war.Their own governments did not protect them.To Henri capture was death.But she could not say this to Marie.

Marie sat softly stroking Sara Lee's hair, her own eyes tragic and tearless.

"Even if it were - the other," she said, "it is not so bad to die for one's country.The thing that is terrible, that leaves behind it only bitterness andgrief and no hope, mademoiselle, even with many prayers, is that one has died a traitor."She coaxed Sara Lee back at last.They went through the fields, for fresh troops were being thrown into the Belgian trenches and the street was full of men.Great dray horses were dragging forward batteries, the heavy guns sliding and slipping In the absence of such information as only Henri had been wont to bring it was best to provide for the worst.

The next day Jean did not come over for breakfast, and Rene handed Sara Lee a note.

"I am going to England," Jean had written that dawn in the house of the mill."And from there to Holland.I can get past the barrier and shall work down toward the Front.I must learn what has happened, mademoiselle.As you know, if he was captured, there is no hope.But there is an excellent chance that he is in hiding, unable to get back.Look for me in two weeks."There followed what instructions he had given as to her supplies, which would come as before.Beautifully written in Jean's small fine hand, it spelled for Sara Lee the last hope.She read Jean's desperation through its forced cheerfulness.And she faced for the first time a long period of loneliness in the crowded little house.

She tried very hard to fill the gap that Henri had left - tried to joke with the men in her queer bits of French; was more smiling than ever, or fear she might be less.But now and then in cautious whispers she heard Henri's name, and her heart contracted with very terror.

A week.Two weeks.Twice the village was bombarded severely, but the little house escaped by a miracle.Marie considered it the same miracle that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood crucifixes to remain nharmed.

Great generals, often as tall as they were great, stopped at the little house to implore Sara Lee to leave.But she only shook her head.

"Not unless you send me away," she always said; "and that would break my heart.""But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!" they would remonstrate, and as a final argument: " You are too valuable to risk an injury.""I must remain here," she said.And some of them thought they understood.When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee would insist on taking him to the cellar.

"You see!" she would say, holding her candle high."It is a nice cellar, warm and dry.It is "- proudly one of the best cellars in the village.It is a really homelike cellar."The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things to protect the little house as much as possible.After a time the little house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in its early stages, of many different minds.

Rene shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in the shadows up the street.It was just before dawn, and Rene, who was sleepless those days, like the others, called to him.The man started to run, dodging behind walls.But Rene ran faster and killed him.

He was a German in Belgian peasant's clothing.But he wore the great shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the Belgian trenches.

Sara Lee did not see him.But when she heard the shot she went out, and Rene told her breathlessly.

>From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field.