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,
for 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
unharmed.
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."