Lorraine, A Romance

As they sat opposite each other, smiling, a little flurried at finding themselves alone at table together, but eating with the appetites of very young lovers, the warm summer wind, blowing through the open windows, bore to their ears the songs of forest birds. It bore another sound, too; Jack had heard it for the last two hours, or had imagined he heard it--a low, monotonous vibration, now almost distinct, now lost, now again discernible, but too vague, too indefinite to be anything but that faint summer harmony which comes from distant breezes, distant movements, mingling with the stir of drowsy field insects, half torpid in the heat of noon.

Still it was always there; and now, turning his ear to the window, he laid down knife and fork to listen.

"I have also noticed it," said Lorraine, answering his unasked question.

"Do you hear it now?"

"Yes--more distinctly now."

A few moments later Jack leaned back in his chair and listened again.

"Yes," said Lorraine, "it seems to come nearer. What is it?"

"It comes from the southeast. I don't know," he answered.

They rose and walked to the window. She was so near that he breathed the subtle fragrance of her hair, the fresh sweetness of her white gown, that rustled beside him.

"Hark!" whispered Lorraine; "I can almost hear voices in the breezes--the murmur of voices, as if millions of tiny people were calling us from the ends and outer edges of the earth."

"There is a throbbing, too. Do you notice it?"

"Yes--like one's heart at night. Ah, now it comes nearer--oh, nearer! nearer! Oh, what can it be?"

He knew now; he knew that indefinable battle--rumour that steals into the senses long before it is really audible. It is not a sound--not even a vibration; it is an immense foreboding that weights the air with prophecy.

"From the south and east," he repeated; "from the Landesgrenze."

"The frontier?"

"Yes. Hark!"

"I hear."

"From the frontier," he said again. "From the river Lauter and from Wissembourg."

"What is it?" she whispered, close beside him.

"Cannon!"

Yes, it was cannon--they knew it now--cannon throbbing, throbbing, throbbing along the horizon where the crags of the Geisberg echoed the dull thunder and shook it far out across the vineyards of Wissembourg, where the heights of Kapsweyer, resounding, hurled back the echoes to the mountains in the north.

"Why--why does it seem to come nearer?" asked Lorraine.

"Nearer?" He knew it had come nearer, but how could he tell her what that meant?

"It is a battle--is it not?" she asked again.

"Yes, a battle."

She said nothing more, but stood leaning along the wall, her white forehead pressed against the edge of the raised window-sash. Outside, the little birds had grown suddenly silent; there was a stillness that comes before a rain; the leaves on the shrubbery scarcely moved.