Chapter XIV: The Six Millions

But the wound proved “not dangerous,” though “grave,” and though accompanied in its “history” by some delirium; and meantime the most detested of men was the dead Alexis, since it never entered any head to question that it was he who had shot, and then shot himself—though a divisional surgeon took his oath that the course of that bullet was the oddest which he had ever beheld in any suicide.

“But why a bullet, and not the Redlike Ray?” the Prince wondered on that morning four weeks later when he began to get well again: “and where is the ray now? And Chinnery—where’s _he_? And the Six Millions? There’s a something somewhere at work....”

From these musings he turned to a heap of newspapers by his bed; and all that forenoon was reading, reading, feasting his interest....

For during those weeks of his weakness the wheeling of the top had come to the humming mood, and the humdrum old world was whirling in a vertigo of the giddiest delirium toward the gulf’s rim. He saw headlines like “All the World at War, save China,” and even as he wondered of what vertiginous vintage the children of men had drunk, he himself was drunken with it.

Austria, it appeared, was no longer in the Triple Alliance! Austria had broken loose from it in order to fly at the throat of Russia; and _already_ Russian troops of the Reserve Category were being raised, and _levées en masse_ of her _voiskos_.

Whereat let Roumania, suspecting that Russia is aiming at nothing but _her_ destruction, rush thundering round her frontiers; and quick now let Servia, with her back on Knuzevatz, mass two _corps d’armée_ upon Nisch and Vranja, to spring upon her Bulgarian victors and allies of old, and have a bitter draught of sour milk and the bacillus Bulgaricus.

It was as when one planet of a system slips on her course, and two collide, why, then, the whole thing’s upset, and they all decide to collide for luck, and it is a case of baking days then, yes, and of break-neck days, Monday fleeing from the wrath to come through the middle of Sunday, vast arcs of moons that loom from Arctic to Antarctic, with scarlet laughter of all the gods and dogs of war.

For the European clock had struck the hour, and it was now or never for placing on the stage a thousand schemes of greed, aggression, and revenge.

Therefore let Sweden quickly throw two infantry divisions into Björneborg, with Helsingfors for their _objectif_, to drag her Finns from that rigorous grip of Russia, and Sweden is an ally of England—Sweden and Norway, Denmark and America, Spain, Portugal.

Denmark, the long-suffering, long docked and hedged-in, saw the day of vengeance dawn, and at the alarm of the first mortar, had darted to arms, to start for Flensburg; while American squadrons, in a drama of warfare in the Hwang Hai off Chefoo, had fought in French and English lines of battle: a drama in which 236,000 had sunk 103,000 tons of Russo-German metal, with only eight ships remaining to the victors: upon which injured ships a Japanese squadron had fallen the same afternoon, and sunk or captured them.

On that same day bombarding battleships of Japan were barking from afar at San Francisco; and a Japanese squadron was sighted on the horizon by the Cockatoo Island coastguard (Sydney).

All yonder, too, in Texas, is America crackling, hordes of goat-footed Mexicans in coloured rags attacking “the Gringoes” in guerilla brigade-sections, sniping from behind hedge and ditch, peeping along their Lee Metfords’ sights with a piercing eye. And not far from that crackling is all the area of Ecuador crackling, ravaged by troops of Peruvian sharp-shooters.

Everywhere the same frenzy of revelry. _Mobilmachung!_ The agitated hand snatches the rifle, the wild eye dashes for the ranks. Only where Li Ku Yu sits sipping buttermilk-tea among lotuses and marvels of marble serene peace breathes on the breezes.

He makes no sign; he waits; he brazenly smiles; he has a clear clean block of brain without one hair on it, a rock cut out without hands: he sits and stimulates it with tea.

And he revels in the revel and frenzy. Nothing escapes his eye, his meditation. Looking over the sea he can see that America has out hosts of converted merchant-cruisers furnished with box-batteries of four and six inchers, fighting, to the astonishment of men, with battleships—fighting, often conquering. A White Star liner of the San Francisco-Nagasaki trade-route, meeting two large Japanese cruisers in Mid-Pacific sank both before she sank; and the _Lusitania_, in an affray with a troop of sea-keeping sloops and torpedo gunboats, patrolling the Atlantic for tit-bits, sank half before they fled, and then kept afloat until within sight of Ireland.

Seeing which, Britain had begun late in the day to accumulate stores of fittings and armaments at home ports and naval stations for such ships; some of their crews were complemented from Colonial Naval Reserves; and they were spurting mirthfully over the oceans, having the highest and liveliest time.

Thanks in great part to them, our country had not yet begun to starve.

Rich still on paper, her consols still taken up, St Swithin’s Lane and Wall Street her allies, half the owners of securities all over the globe hoping for her triumph, she was, nevertheless, in the grip of want, and already saw a skeleton grin at her from the air.

Protective tariffs in other countries had vanished like chaff two weeks after the going off of the first gun, so that England’s free trade no longer made her a magnet for imports; and since supplies were dodging and fighting their way precariously from Canada, the Government granaries ran every day lower.

A Russian _ukase_ had prohibited the exportation of wheat—a ridiculous thing, since no creature in Russia would now have dreamed of exporting wheat. That immense breadth of empire was already doddering horridly to its drop.

Hardly a week after the _Mauretania_ battle, Austria, with a heart fond for Salonica, had flung across the Save a body of Uhlans, who had coolly occupied Belgrade; and the next morning sections of brigades bivouacking in the squares, and Austrian officers gossiping on the boulevards, had met the gaze of the amazed Belgradians.

Whereat the Great White Czar waxed whiter, and Young Turkey grew tough to the teeth of her eaters, massing regulars and redifs, green-bannered, class on class, calling “gather, gather, all ye birds of ravin” to her Berbers, Sanoussis. For see Macedonia broken in a roar of flame, the Vali of Saloniki assassinated on his doorstep, whereupon the Great Archimandrite, His Holiness the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was mutilated in a room of his palace, and that same evening telegraphic communication was broken between Odessa and Constantinople, and the Suez Canal blown up.

And now an anarchy of thunder and waltz of all the vortices in the Near East, thirty thousand Athenians surging across the Thessalian frontier, Crete bursting into burning with bands of bandits girt with the dirk and carbine of rapine marauding from end to end, upon all which the Turkish _Turgut Reis_ is hurling shell-fire, quenching hell with hell; and at the same time a mob of Turkish gunboats is going northward through the Bosphorus to watch the (Russian) Black Sea Squadron (convoying two corps from Odessa), quietly occupy Bulgarian Bourgas—directly connected by rail with Stamboul.

And still faster spins the dance, like the sand-forms of the sand-storm that vastly, dartly waltz into conflict. The next day Austria declared against Russia a war which had begun before the declaration; and on the third day after the occupation of Bourgas the eastern limb of the British Mediterranean Fleet steamed through the Bosphorus to seek the Black Sea Fleet, and bombard Sevastopol.

Russia had enough to do: at the fourth week-end, if she looked south, south-west, north, west, east, or inward at her own bankruptcy, she everywhere saw handwriting on her walls. Sweden at Helsingfors was looking toward Cronstadt; twelve Swedish armoured ships at the Neva-mouth. The Black Sea littoral was British. The Army of India, with the Teheran railway in its hands, had scattered at Merv the Army of Turkestan, and after a four days’ carnival of carnage at Novo Tcherkask, had marched by road to Kharkov, to turn its face toward the Kremlin.

Another mixed army of Turks and English had thoroughly crushed the Russian corps that had advanced from Kars to invest Erzeroun.

Russia’s 4th with her 8th to her 12th Southern Corps had, indeed, inflicted annihilation upon the Austrian army massed on the Dneister in Eastern Galicia; but Austria’s second army on the San, its back on Przemsyl (the bulwark of Middle Galicia), and her third based on Cracow (the key of Western Galicia), had followed the Moltke maxim of marching apart and fighting together, and after a tug-of-war only surpassed for carnage by that drama of gore transacting itself over Northern France, had made Poland Austrian, and crossed the sources of the Niemen.

Add to this that Vladivostock was even now cracking and nodding under rollicking cataracts of Japanese thunder; and thundering multitudes of puny Japanese troops, amusing themselves with butchery, were intruding and intruding through Manchuria, reeling up as on a reel the Siberian railway.

And France, _la belle_, was unwell of her _règles_, and blanched; and Max had a malady and chancre from intercourse with her.

In Eastern Germany the Army of the Vistula was at grips with the gallantry and zeal of the Swedish levies, who with astonishing dash had advanced far through the great military _dépôts_ of the north-east, and after capturing the Thorn-Posen railway, had drawn a ring of earthworks and Schumann gun-turrets round Posen, in the teeth of the teeming legions of that Eastern region—Royal Saxon Corps, draughts from Thorn, that Metz of the East, from Königsberg—who in vain had flung themselves in wave on wave upon these unexpected fairheads.

And northward, with a display of hardly less audacity and energy, Denmark was campaigning in Schleswig-Holstein, and had sat down before Kiel; while south-westward on the French frontier the two great branches of the Teutonic race had dashed together shockingly: so that eighteen of the twenty German corps were already in the field, her burghers and shopkeepers now girding on the bandolier, and now was the winter of her Bourse’s discontent.

As for France, the Light of the world was like a candle flickering in a draught.

See Italy southward redeeming now her “unredeemed” territories, her Haute Savoy, Alpes Hautes, for now is the day, and Frenchmen and vermicelli never yet went well together.

Therefore what is left of the Italian navy (it had been smashed, and had smashed, in a battle off Cape Spartivento) shall bombard three days the Riviera batteries, while swarms of Bersaglieri, Alpini, Carabinieri shall clamber like chamois among the Alp passes under a shadow of aeroplane-wings, their cannons carried on active-footed mules, pushing their advance against troops of dragoons and mountain-chasseurs, swaggering black rascals of Spahis, Zouaves, garbed in gaudy cloths; and in the European hotchpotch some cynic camels shall sulk and snarl, and die with a repining eye.

And when the Italian 2nd, 4th and 6th have effected a landing near Nice, has broken bloodily through the French 7th, 14th and 15th, have crossed the Isère, then Paris knows panic and _émeute_.

And under the double tonnage of Russia and Germany France must already have suffocated, but for the rescuing strength of Britain.

Britain, with a slow but increasing heat, was becoming a recruiting _dépôt_, her Lancashire blackamoors, her Cockney bits of boys, her Scottish bodies, her Irish devils ever steadier, keener, streaming to see to it—nimbly! soldiers in a week, warriors in a fortnight, veterans in a month: for, as things now were, if France went down, Britain, too, foundered like a ship in the sea: and British men said “not yet.”

There, therefore, all along that north-eastern frontier of France backed by the charming land of Champagne, the fire was hell-fire, and the rigour of the game pretty grim—the men of England coming, pressing, checked, beaten back, defeated, hampered, badgered, butchered, fretted, pestered, but still coming, pressing, getting every day their dreadful pecker up, struggling like tunnel-diggers grinning at the ruggedness of granite, winning an inch, and still an inch, and an inch, until that momentous December midnight when the men of Mars must have marked the carmine of the fall of Metz, and have heard some murmur of that turmoil on earth.

Of it Eulalia wrote to her mother: “I should not care to live through such a thing again, though not for anything should I like to have lived without having once lived through it.”

And again nine days later: “I am not well, and even if I be everything that’s bad, daddy might let you write to say if you are alive, and wish one a happy Christmas. Perhaps some day twenty years hence you may hear more than whatever it is you have heard, and may think then of me more forgivingly.

“It is hard to say quite what is wrong, but I am pretty sickified. Yesterday Surgeon-Major Burke peeped under my eyelids, felt my pulse, and said: ‘It is the heart’—wonderful discovery! Doctors amuse me.

“But some of the nursing-staff are beginning to look rather askance at me, I fancy, for the two company-waggons are pretty full of sick, one of the junior dressers died of typhoid three days ago, and one, of course, ought to be ‘all there.’ But I forget things, I am very remiss really—I can no more help it than be the bedmate of a Long Tom; all I want to do now is to lie alone in woods, and give myself up, and I dream such things, that I want to be always asleep. Of course, I make a good old struggle.

“Early on the morning of the 21st I started out from our sycamore-tree to go into Nürnfeld—I told you, did I, that the 2nd and 3rd companies have been billeted on Nürnfeld village after a good deal of hardships and marching to come up with our brigade? Well, our junior surgeon had got a permit from Captain Hardinge for one of the six stretcher-bearers of the 2nd to take the place of Davis, the dresser, who is dead, so I was going to get the man, when, just as I had passed the baggage-park sentries, something very strange came over me. There lay the village before me, the lantern still burning before the senior officer’s cottage-door, a few Tommies yawning in the dawn at doorways where they stood sentry over their squads: but I seemed to see it in a dream somehow. After passing the outlying sentry, I walked on to a cottage which they call the alarm-quarter, where an inlying picket of six have to keep awake all night, and I remember seeing the six fellows playing cards in a room, with their belts loose, round a lantern on a box; but there I seem to have stopped to lean on the window, and—they _say_ that I fainted, though I don’t think that I fainted.

“Anyway, I was there so long, that Sister Darling had to come to look for me, found me sitting in the alarm-quarter, and then—she is such an angel, always—would not let me go back to the field-hospital, but said I must wander about all day, and take a good rest.

“Well, I did; and it was a day of destiny to me: for at four in the afternoon the most marvellous thing that you ever could fancy happened to me.

“I took something to eat in my knapsack, and in passing beyond the canteen met a Lieutenant Pierce, who told me that there was a rumour that fighting was probable that day between our outpost garrison and an advanced detail of the enemy. Our brigade, you must understand, is said to be now diamond-shaped, the 2nd and 3rd forming the south corner of the diamond, we being in the far north wing of our army, which is now facing the enemy on a front of some seventy-five miles, by report; and everyone is saying that the two hosts are getting well into touch, so you can look out for more things happening before you lose your next tooth. Oh, it is a big business this. On the night of the 12th, the fourth night before the fall of Metz, my company was camped on an incline, and before I went to sleep I could see the fires of a whole division in the snows at my feet reaching far into the darkness, battalion after battalion, with their batteries and their sentries in great-coats, seeming a scene in some great dream. And this mass of man, animal, cannon and baggage was but the advance-guard of a far vaster war-host which occupied the North; and hidden away in the dark was the still vaster war-host of the enemy.

“Well, after hearing that that advanced corner of our diamond might be fighting, I thought that I had had enough of bow-wow, and would keep clear of it. But I must have soon forgotten where I was going, and, as a matter of fact, put my little shoe into the thick of it, for near two o’clock, when I must have walked seven or eight miles, I twice heard band-music going, then a bugle somewhere calling form-company-columns, and presently I saw a train of artillery-horses straining uphill to my left, for the country just here is very broken.

“After this I came to a village as big as Holmend, in which I saw not one living thing but a dog that skedaddled on seeing me. There were bits of shell about, the houses in ruin, and in front of a school a little outside the village were two mountain gun-carriages with their guns and artillery waggons wrecked, and a gunner stretched on the ground under one of the waggons, with his dragoon-sword and revolvers still at his belt, poor boy. You wouldn’t think how lonely and consoling it was there, and I sat a long time on one of the scorched cottage-steps. The afternoon was quite warm, though there are patches of snow over the hillsides.

“Then a sound of big guns roused me, and, as it always does, drew me, for it’s in the creature’s breed, no doubt. So I set out eastward down some steep fields, and half-way down could see through trees a company of Greys in column of squads stepping with their swinging kilts, the gallant laddies, their marker galivanting in advance with the flag like a man gone dancing and dotty with arrogance, a couple of field-guns and an _échelon_ of baggage coming in their rear, and in front their screaming bagpipes that craze men’s brains with bravery. Really, men are dear creatures, the good-hearted, simple, strong dears. I vow I’d rather a man than one of those angels that ‘went in to the daughters of men.’ Perhaps you will say, ‘Yes, that’s why your father has had to turn you from home.’ Well, perhaps. You must think as you will, mother. God made us.

“So I went on making my way by fields and paths, the row growing, till I got in sight of a mountain, beyond the brow of which I saw a haze, for smokeless powder still makes a haze and a smell when lots of it are fired by troops in close order; and on the mountain’s slope, near the top, my fieldglass soon spied a supply-store and headquarters signalling station, with gun-emplacements, and a dressing-station lower down, and at the bottom under cover of a crag a group of ammunition-carts and ambulance-waggons with flags on them.

“Lying down near the top was a line of Inniskillings, forming the reserve of the firing-line on the farther slope, and two hundred yards or so below stood the Greys on a road. I was astonished when I got on the upper ground that the Inniskillings were not touched, for it looked to me as if small pompom shrapnel was spattering all about the mountain-top, and the battle was going on with the din of an engine which roars, groans, whizzes and horridly rattles.

“I wanted to go up to the Inniskillings to see, for that might do me good to get some lead in me, but a lance-corporal of the Greys shook his finger furiously at me, so I walked aside till I got to a crag where I scrambled down with some skirt-dance adventures, for I seem to be quite strong and active, really, but ‘it’s the heart’; and I got in the end to a mounting meadow, like the Tump at home, a quarter of a mile or so to the left front of the mountain, and in it I found a waterworks reservoir in a mound, and on the reservoir two German girls lying quite silent with their chins on their fists.

“We were not very safe there, some of the enemy’s shells dropping pretty near at the bottom of our meadow, but, then, we could see, though the smoke blown from four cottages and a wood burning on the slope bothered one’s vision.

“Our men were in four shelter-pits with loopholes, or rather in three, for I could spy that one was full of nothing but forage-caps stuck on sticks to draw the enemy’s fire; and there was a covered retreat in the rear of them out of which I saw three wounded carried up.

“At the moment when I lay down the enemy were pretty near the mountain: I could spy them like mice in a line darting out of one bit of cover into another bit, like one in a bitter wind winning one’s way, their artillery from somewhere miles away still pounding our mountain with mortar and pompom, having the range exactly apparently, and ours mouthing back across heaven from the mountain-top.

“Then I could see the enemy’s firing-line running from behind three houses, then jumping a stone hedge, and their cheer for the charge reached me faintly; the next minute they were on the hill-slope; and I pitied them, they looked so little running up there in comparison with the mountain and with the amount of sound around them that they were foundering in, for they had hardly advanced ten yards when they broke like thread before our thundering trenches, upon which our firing line leapt the trenches to chase them, the reserve Inniskillings ran down to help, and the signalling-station signalled the Greys, who ran up and then down to pelt pell-mell into the trenches.

“I think, though, that the enemy’s ranks soon rallied, though I could hardly tell what was happening for the hazes of smoke that smudged the valley in patches; moreover, a country house that had broken into smouldering rolled most of it in smoke.

“In the midst of it a sound made me glance to my left—cavalry!

“The road that runs north and south along the bottom of the mountain winds eastward at the north end of the meadow where the reservoir is; and on that east part of it I saw a squadron in column of sixes ride out from behind a rise on tall white horses. At the same time I was startled by the two German girls, who sprang wildly up, clapping their hands and laughing, crying out “Cossacks! Cossacks!”—and no doubt they were Cossacks, but they were certainly captained by a German, for I soon heard his frantic howling—they howl ‘_Charge! Double! Hurrah!_’ at a charge—or they may have been a mixed body. Anyway, on they came straight toward me with their busbies, dark-green knickerbockers and top-boots, from slow to fast, the white horses fretting wildly neck to neck, with their wild captain waving his sabre some yards in front of all, calling them, while quicker and quicker the hundreds of their legs drummed the ground with a steady growth of passion from a hand-gallop to a field-gallop and from a field-gallop to an avalanche. It was frightful, but nice.

“Meantime, they were being knocked over, man and animal, by the Greys, and trampled, though I don’t think the Greys could see them yet for the trees: so no wonder they made haste.

“Their aim was to take the mountain while our main body was engaged away to the east with theirs, and I thought they were going to gallop and sabre our position; but when they got under the north end of my meadow, where they were in dead ground from the mountain, two-thirds of them sprang off, without stopping, every first and third man tossing their reins to every second man, as I could see by standing up and peering; and in a moment these two-thirds were jumping the stone hedge on the farther side of the road, leaving three dead there at the corner, and I lost sight of them for a minute, till I saw them again jumping the stone hedge, well spread out now, opposite the mountain: and they charged.

“There seemed to me to be precious little cover for them on the slope, for our men must have burnt off much of the bush before occupying it, so these poor cavalrymen got it hot enough on those lower slopes from the grim Greys, the row rolling without an instant’s interval for minutes together, like ten million motor-bicycles going bang-bang, strong stuff. I saw lots of them catch at imaginary balls, as they dodged up from point to point; but they did not break; on they struggled; and suddenly it struck me that the Greys’ fire was growing slack, and then I was sure, and then it stopped, and my heart sank. Why they had given in so soon I could not understand, and could have cried. The two German girls were standing, grinning, on the very brink of the reservoir, white as milk with excitement, and in another minute they were screaming, clapping, ‘Victory! The Cossacks! Hurrah!’ Really, Germans have very offensive manners, and nobody can possibly be more excitable.

“Well, what followed I would not see the end of, it was too painful. The Cossacks, or whatever they were, leapt clamouring upon our trenches, and even as they leapt, poor dears, they were perishing like sheep. I never saw such a thing—I would not see it. When they leapt upon the trenches it was to find them empty, since the Greys had retired secretly by covered retreats to other trenches hidden in some fold of the hillside, and from that second position, even as the hot Cossacks cheered in victory, came the withering shock of the Greys’ volley at horridly close quarters. Think of it, their tragic fix, the mantrap, the massacre. The Cossacks skedaddled like a flock of cats scattering from dogs, those Greys raining a purgatory of curses after them, and I scattered also, getting over a gate into the road where a third of the Cossacks were, holding the others’ horses, and I walked along it some way, until I came to a wood, where I lay down....

“But no, I am not going to tell even you—not yet, anyway—what befell me there. I will send you this lot by our post to-night. It is already a long lot, and has taken me three afternoons, for I like, I suppose, to talk of it all to you. You might write once: you could, secretly, if you tried. Remember that I am sick, and even if I am a sinner, though I do not admit that I am particularly, suffering atones for things. I’ll think of you all on Christmas Day, for I don’t bear Alice any malice, tell her, if you will of me, and will write, for I love you more than any of you know. And will you send any news, and if you see any bits about the Prince of Wales, will you send, as Sister Darling is madly in love with him, poor girl, and I, too, I’m afraid. I wonder if any more girls have gone sillified for him, the sillies?

“‘For her skipper was Ted,
And Teddy’s a bear....’

so don’t forget this, and think kindly of your own, and good-bye, God bless you.

“+Eulalia.+”

As to “what befell” her in that wood where she “lay down,” it is soon told.

In the wood she spied a church ruin, which was like a solitude within a solitude, and, in love with solitude, she went into it, and lay within a mass of bramble and bracken at its west end, which was a solitude within a solitude within a solitude.

Indeed, her mind and body were now in a sicklier way than her letter quite exhibits, so sick now, so afflicted and down with love, that only a don of Cupid College could have shrewdly construed and doctored her. It was the air-disease, nameless! Her bosom seemed to yearn for the moon to nurse, and if this had been given her, she would have hungered for the sun to hug. As she lay there within the bush, her lids shut, her hands under her head, crushing her four-penny loaf of gold-hair, there were moments when the Prince’s face appeared quite visibly to her, like a vision just over her nose, staring eye to eye at her stare; and she smiled then at peace, and then it was gone, and her body tossed for ease, all sighs and pining, pallor and languishment.

Though she had been so very nigh to his life—and few men are fairies to their wives—he was now quite a Fairy Prince in her brain, the shout of the world about him perhaps girding him in purple glamours for her; and since their married intimacy seemed not less than a hundred centuries ago, she was as fresh and flushed with love as if she had never had him: for it was necessary to her to look at the ring and reread his letters, in order to realise that her once nearness to him was not a dream. So with jealous shoots of pain she pictured him living and moving among Mohammedan heavens set immensely above her, forgetting her and her century-old caresses; and stodgy old Buckingham Palace, guarded by stodgy bobbies, became to her fantasy an achingly enchanted fabric of romance.

And the thought that it was she herself who had cast it all from her with her own hand caused her to moan. But the notion of breaking down in her undertaking does not seem ever now to have entered her head even, stronger than all tugs and gusts in the gale of her nature being self-respect; and still her word was, “if I’m a Princess, I’ll be Princess-like.”

She was no longer conscious of the firing, which continued some twenty minutes more, nor of its stoppage; what shocked her into consciousness was a sense that _someone else_ was there in the ruins: she raised her head; saw “Mademoiselle Oyone”; and in the very thick of her wonder sucked in her breath, with “How truly lovely she is!”

There stood Oyone in the nave, at the middle, with that lissom hint of her hips and waist, dressed as ever in reds and splendours, a bag in her hand, a swath of veil across her forehead, and she was moving her eyes warily round in such a way, that at once Eulalia was aware that her visit here was secret.

But before ever Eulalia could reveal herself, Oyone was moving swiftly into the chancel-part, and Eulalia was so astonished to see her move her eyes slowly round once more, and then rapidly lift a slab by a ring, and vanish down a hole, that she had sat hushed.

Now, however, she thought that she hardly ought to watch, so she gingerly got up to go slipping on tiptoe away; but chanced to step on some loose stones which rolled; stumbled: and Oyone heard it.

Oyone spurted like a bird to peer at the brink, but a little late to see Eulalia, who had that instant slipped out. She thought, though, that she could catch sounds out in the coppice, and made haste to follow, prepared to slay.

She had already in her bag what she had come for, a bar of gold: the fact being that the old woman, A-lu-te, was then dying, in consequence of which there had been some difficulty as to the signature on cheques, so the Chinese household was in straits for ready money, and Oyone had come and stolen a bar of Li Ku Yu’s hoard, to break up.

And the question was: _had she been seen_?

She had more sense of ownership in this hoard than labourers in their honest wage; she had more pride in it than scientists in their conquests; and the mere thought that any god, or man, or fiend, should ever dare to ferret it out and drag it from her grasp roused in her that same gasping, arrogant rancour with which aristocracies resent any attempt to wrest from their maw the rents of their atrocity and dishonour. “Have I not _been seen_?” she asked Heaven; and _soft, soft_, she dropped back the slab, and went peering through the forest, but she was now well weighted with the bar in the bag, and before she came to a sight of Eulalia, Eulalia was out on the road.

And now Oyone was left uncertain; but the mere suspicion that she _might have been seen_ inflamed her to a hissing hate, and was quite sufficient to be fatal to Eulalia. She had both dagger and fire-arm; and she suddenly ran out to Eulalia, who was now moving westward toward a main-station which the Germans had just set up at the roadside; and she called to Eulalia: “What, Miss Bayley!”

“Think of our meeting!” she said, when Eulalia turned, bowed, and met her: “You are in the army, then? To what part do you belong?”

“The 2nd Somersetshires.”

“And _I_ have been with an old friend at St Pierre-les-Sapins, and now have lost my way in woods, looking for the station.”

Saying which, she kept her eyes on Eulalia’s face, and when Eulalia faintly blushed at the lie, this infuriated Oyone. Her next words were: “I can’t bear to see those men: will you walk a little this way with me?”—she pointed eastward, for a little westward were two tents with lanterns and flags at their doors, and operating-tables within, and before them a throng of ambulance-waggons and stretchers with gashed men on them, who gave out a sound of lamentation, and within the tents two surgeons and their helps, as busily working, and as coolly, as butchers.

Before these witnesses nothing was to be done by Oyone; and by a blessed inspiration Eulalia replied to her invitation that she had to go back to her post.

At this refusal Oyone’s eyes lightened with spite.

“But it is droll,” she grossly said, looking Eulalia straight in the face, “that you, a Prince’s honey, should be here slaving! Or has he tired of you?—you look a little ill. I hope _I_ am not the cause, for His Royal Highness is always teasing me lately.”

Up went the other’s chin; and loftily she uttered a word and a letter: “My h——!” then turned and went on her way westward, with a hotter wound in her than those wounded.

Oyone, for her part, glanced at her watch, and went eastward, past the wood of the ruin; but threw herself on a grass bank beyond a winding of the road, writhing, wringing her hands, thinking: “I think she did—I’ll see her dead, I must! or I’ll know no peace.... She said the 2nd Somersetshires....”

Meantime, Eulalia had turned back, to see what was under that slab with the ring: for now rancour was in her, too; and she thought: “I will.”

So, after passing the scene of stretchers and shrieks westward, she passed it eastward again, saw no one on the road before her, ran into the wood, the ruin, raised the flag, and not without some ghostly tremors, for now it was growing dark, went down the steps.

Down there it was already black, but she struck a match from her knapsack: and there before her against a broken wall stood a great cube of gold bars glowing....

The weight of one that she lifted amazed her....

Now she sat on a step, considering it. And suddenly her hands started up. “_This is the Six Millions...._”

_Yes!_ There was the “_Reichskriegs-schatz_” stamped in the bars—the Six Millions found—and by her.

She laughed a little sillily, all in Aladdin-land, dazzled. But after a time she laughed again not sillily, understanding much.

She saw now that she had long been sub-jealous of the half-caste; and now that pang was over for ever. “_It was she_ who destroyed the air-boats, she and Chinnery,” Eulalia was soon saying; “and she was near to where he was shot in the Strand, for I saw her; it is she who is at the bottom of everything; and it is not love, but hatred that is between them!” Then she laughed.

But what now to do? She was there in the dark a long time meditating it. To tell? To keep it dark? It occurred to her that six million pounds might well buy her the right and title of Princess of Wales.

To whom, though, did this treasure rightfully belong? Not to Germany, surely: it had been taken in war-time. Not to England: it had been taken by private enterprise. Not, of course, to Oyone. It belonged to “Teddy”! and, if to “Teddy,” then, to “Teddy’s” wife: it was _hers_! And multimillionairesses can buy many things!

She would wait and see what she would do....

Meantime, Oyone had started to come back to the wood under an impulse of vague disquiet; but then had been pulled the other way by having to catch her train.