The Amazing Interlude - Mary Roberts Rinehart (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such phrases as:
"Il y a une erreur dans la note," and "Garçon, quels fruits avez-vous?"
She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last. There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding.
So she got as far as: "Dearest Harvey: I am here in a hotel at Dunkirk"—and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness. Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things—Uncle James in his chair by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from school.
She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle. Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top of the mairie perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer for quiet sleep.
For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor lorries—she called them trucks—piled high with supplies, often fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food. Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers.
Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up, too, and there would be an aëroplane sliding along, sometimes so low that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust.
But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly. Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those two interminable days.
Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops—a symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect—inside those cars were wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care. Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger and sent a little message to him.
"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so terrible! So pitiful!"
Yet during the day the square was gay enough. Officers in spurs clanked across, wide capes blowing in the wind. Common soldiers bought fruit and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths. Countless dogs fought under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of Jean Bart, pirate and privateer.
Sara Lee went out daily, but never far. And she practiced French with the maid, after this fashion:
"Draps de toile," said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on the bed.
Sara Lee would repeat it some six times.
"Taies d'oreiller," when the pillows came. So Sara Lee called pillows by the name of their slips from that time forward! Came a bright hour when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she certainly did not need, with entire success.
On the second night Sara Lee slept badly. At two o'clock she heard a sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door. On a stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed.
The light from her candle roused him and he was wide awake in an instant.
"Why, Jean!" she said. "Isn't there any place for you to sleep?"
"I am to remain here, mademoiselle," he replied in English.
"But surely—not because of me?"
"It is the captain's order," he said briefly.
"I don't understand. Why?"
"All sorts of people come to this place, mademoiselle. But few ladies. It is best that I remain here."
She could not move him. He had remained standing while she spoke to him, and now he yawned, striving to conceal it. Sara Lee felt very uncomfortable, but Jean's attitude and voice alike were firm. She thanked him and said good night, but she slept little after that.
Lying there in the darkness, a warm glow of gratitude to Henri, and a feeling of her safety in his care, wrapped her like a mantle. She wondered drowsily if Harvey would ever have thought of all the small things that seemed second nature to this young Belgian officer.
She rather thought not.
IX
While she was breakfasting the next morning there was a tap at the door, and thinking it the maid she called to her to come in.
But it was Jean, an anxious Jean, twisting his cap in his hands.
"You have had a message from the captain, mademoiselle?"
"No, Jean."
"He was to have returned during the night. He has not come, mademoiselle."
Sara Lee forgot her morning negligée in Jean's harassed face.
"But—where did he go?"
Jean shrugged his shoulders and did not reply.
"Are you worried about him?"
"I am anxious, mademoiselle. But I am often anxious; and—he always returns."
He smiled almost sheepishly. Sara Lee, who had no subtlety but a great deal of intuition, felt that there was a certain relief in the smile, as though Jean, having had no message from his master, was pleased that she had none. Which was true enough, at that. Also she felt that Jean's one eye was inspecting her closely, which was also true. A new factor had come into Henri's life—by Jean's reasoning, a new and dangerous one. And there were dangers enough already.
Highly dangerous, Jean reflected in the back of his head as he backed out with a bow. A young girl unafraid of the morning sun and sitting at a little breakfast table as fresh as herself—that was a picture for a war-weary man.
Jean forgot for a moment his anxiety for Henri's safety in his fear for his peace of mind. For a doubt had been removed. The girl was straight. Jean's one sophisticated eye had grasped that at once. A good girl, alone, and far from home! And Henri, like all soldiers, woman-hungry for good women, for unpainted skins and clear eyes and the freshness and bloom of youth.
All there, behind that little breakfast table which might so pleasantly have been laid for two.
Jean took a walk that morning, and stood staring for twenty minutes into a clock maker's window, full of clocks. After which he drew out his watch and looked at the time!
At two in the afternoon Sara Lee saw Henri's car come into the square. It was, if possible, more dilapidated than before, and he came like a gray whirlwind, scattering people and dogs out of his way. Almost before he had had time to enter the hotel Sara Lee heard him in the hall, and the next moment he was bowing before her.
"I have been longer than I expected," he explained. "Have you been quite comfortable?"
Sara Lee, however, was gazing at him with startled eyes. He was dirty, unshaven, and his eyes looked hollow and bloodshot. From his neck to his heels he was smeared with mud, and his tidy tunic was torn into ragged holes.
"But you—you have been fighting!" she gasped.
"I? No, mademoiselle. There has been no battle." His eyes left her and traveled over the room. "They are doing everything for you? They are attentive?"
"Everything is splendid," said Sara Lee. "If you won't tell me how you got into that condition, at least you can send your coat down to me to mend."
"My tunic!" He looked at it smilingly. "You would do that?"
"I am nearly frantic for something to do."
He smiled, and suddenly bending down he took her hand and kissed it.
"You are not only very beautiful, mademoiselle, but you are very good."
He went away then, and Sara Lee got out her sewing things. The tunic came soon, carefully brushed and very ragged. But it was not Jean who brought it; it was the Flemish boy.
And upstairs in a small room with two beds Sara Lee might have been surprised to find Jean, the chauffeur, lying on one, while Henri shaved himself beside the other. For Jean, of the ragged uniform and the patch over one eye, was a count of Belgium, and served Henri because he loved him. And because, too, he was no longer useful in that little army where lay his heart.
Sometime a book will be written about the Jeans of this war, the great friendships it has brought forth between men. And not the least of its stories will be that of this Jean of the one eye. But its place is not here.
And perhaps there will be a book about the Henris, also. But not for a long time, and even then with care. For the heroes of one department of an army in the field live and die unsung. Their bravest exploits are buried in secrecy. And that is as it must be. But it is a fine tale to go untold.
After he had bathed and shaved, Henri sat down at a tiny table and wrote. He drew a plan also, from a rough one before him. Then he took a match and burned the original drawing until it was but charred black ashes. When he had finished Jean got up from the bed and put on his overcoat.
"To the King?" he said.
"To the King, old friend."
Jean took the letter and went out.
Down below, Sara Lee sat with Henri's ragged tunic on her lap and stitched carefully. Sometime, she reflected, she would be mending worn garments for another man, now far away. A little flood of tenderness came over her. So helpless these men! There was so much to do for them! And soon, please God, she would be helping other tired and weary men, with food, and perhaps a word—when she had acquired some French—and perhaps a thread and needle.
She dined alone that night, as usual. Henri did not appear, though she had sent what she suspected was his only tunic back to him neatly mended at five o'clock. As a matter of fact Henri was sound asleep. He had meant to rest only for an hour a body that was crying aloud with fatigue. But Jean, coming in quietly, had found him sleeping like a child, and had put his own blanket over him and left him. Henri slept until morning, when Jean, coming up from his vigil outside the American girl's door, found him waking and rested, and rang for coffee.
Jean sat down on the edge of his bed and put on his shoes and puttees. He was a taciturn man, but now he had something to say that he did not like to say. And Henri
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