LXXXII
He was so strangely altered, aged, bleached and wasted, that for some moments Sire my Friend and the other owners of the curled and made-up heads that had pivoted round upon his entrance regarded him in the silence that is born of dismay. The color of old wax, or of a corpse some days dead, an atmosphere of such chilly isolation surrounded this pale spectral figure, that even de Moray, that cool smiling skeptic, knew the shudder of superstitious terror, and felt his thin hair stiffen on his scalp. A worn and shabby Staff uniform of the date of the Presidency hung in folds upon the intruder’s lean and stooping body. His black eyes burned in caves hollowed by protracted mental labors and immense physical exertions. His black hair, long uncut, and mingled with streaks and patches of white, hung in tangled elf-locks to his tarnished epaulets, and drooped in a heavy matted plume upon his brow. To the gaunt hollows beneath his haunted eyes he was raggedly bearded with this piebald mixture. And as he stood before them, intermittent gusts of fever seized and shook him, until his teeth chattered audibly, and his bones seemed to rattle in his baggy, withered skin. As, in one of these gusts, he coughed, and pressed to his parched lips a yellowed cambric handkerchief that was presently bloodstained, de Fleury—reassured by this incontestable proof of mortality—took courage and called him by his name:
“Dunoisse!”
“Dunoisse!... A thousand welcomes,mon cherGeneral!” Sire my Friend, instantly assuming his urbane and benignant air, stepped towards the shabby scarecrow with graciously extended hand. But the scarecrow raised its own, and waved Imperial Majesty back with a gesture so expressive of warning, if not of menace, that the actionsent a shudder through its witnesses. Again they doubted if this were not some ghostly visitant from the world that is beyond the grave.... And again the hacking, tearing cough came to convince them that this was no spirit, but merely a dying man.
Said Sire my Friend, after that slight pause of consternation:
“My good Dunoisse, you have dropped on us—literally from the heavens. As a fact, we had heard on excellent authority that you were—ill—and that the pleasure of welcoming you must be—indefinitely deferred. Upon this account excuse what may strike you as lack of cordiality in our greeting!” He added, and his growing confidence permitted an outcrop of anger upon the smooth polish of his accents. “And explain to us—the rules denying unknown officers access to the Emperor’s private apartments being even more stringent than those which protected the President from such intrusion—how you gained admittance here?”
For all answer, the shape he spoke to lifted its left hand, and showed, hanging loosely on a wasted finger, a signet ring. Sire my Friend, recognizing the token conferring upon his Equerry General, Private Secretary, and Military Secretaries, access to his person at all hours, shrugged his chagrin; and tapped his daintily-shod foot impatiently upon the floor.
“Of course! Naturally! Pardon my forgetfulness!” he said urbanely. “I myself bestowed that Open Sesame upon you, when your skill, and intelligence, and ability prompted me to promote you to a confidential post upon my Staff. And later—when my reliance in your discretion and fidelity led me to place in your most able hands the task which you have so superbly completed—you took the ring with you when you left Paris for the East.” He added, discerning that the black eyes burning in their shadowy caves glanced at the faces of his merry men with doubtfulness:
“Have no fear! These trusted friends who shared with me the secret of the intendedcoup d’Étatparticipate in knowledge of this later—measure of diplomacy.... You have arrived at the very moment of disclosure.... Therefore speak out quite freely, my very good Dunoisse!...”
Dunoisse opened his cracked lips, and said, in a voice so faint and hollow that it might have answered from the sepulcher of Lazarus when the Voice bade the dead come forth:
“I will speak out freely. To do so is my right. None can dispute it.”
He waited, gathering strength, clenching his fleshless hands, breathing painfully; and a glistening upon his sunken parchment temples and the burning patches of red upon his hollow cheeks betrayed the terrible emotions that rent and tore the wasted body that housed a suffering soul.
“I have spread your nets,” he said, in the voice that had lost its clear, sharp ring, and was feeble, and flat, and broken. “From the Balkans to the Pruth I have set your springes—dug your pitfalls—sharpened your hidden stakes. I have put it in your power to precipitate a crisis. To meet events and grapple Fate I used all the strength and all the skill I had.”
He drew a shaken breath and went on:
“I have subsidized scores of men into this service—no man knowing his neighbor for a fellow-conspirator—every man secretly bound by the oath that is most sacred in his sight. Turks, Greeks, Tartars, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Wallachs—all have been pledged not to give aid to Russia, or England the Ally of Russia, in the great War that was presently to be waged with France and the Ottoman Empire—over the Debatable Ground....”
A rush of fever dyed his sallowness to dusky crimson. The heat that radiated from his burning body struck upon the bodies of the other men.
“I served you,” he said, fixing his sunken, glittering eyes upon the face of Imperial Majesty, “to the very gates of Death. Believing myself to be dying, I placed—in the hands of two men who had sought me out and found me—the original charts that proved my task completed, and the tracings of those charts. One, at least, of my messengers could not fail to reach you——”
De Morny said, pointing to the writing-table, where the squares of shiny tracing-paper, covered with spidery diagrams and dotted lines in red and blue and green and vari-colored inks, lay in the yellow radiance cast by the green-shaded lamp:
“There are the proofs that one of your messengers didreach his destination. We had been looking at those marvelous charts the moment before you came in.”
De Morny, Duke and Peer of France, might have been a mouse squeaking in a corner or one of the love-birds and wax-bills—dainty feathered creatures for which Imperial Majesty possessed an amiablepenchant—twittering in its gilded window-cage. For Dunoisse neither saw nor heard him, but folded his thin arms upon his hollow breast, and spoke with his haggard eyes on the face of Sire my Friend.
“I came back to civilization to learn the truth of you. I was not the keeper of your secret, the agent of your power, set to pit craft against craft and insure victory by wise precaution!—I was your dupe, your accomplice, and your tool. Judas! Oh, Judas!” said Dunoisse, in a dry, fierce rustling whisper that was like the sirocco passing through a field of withered maize-stalks. “How is it that I believed you—knowing you besmeared with blood, and rotten to the soul with deceits and falsehoods? How shouldInot be among the number of those you have flattered and swindled and betrayed?”
The silence of sickening consternation was on each of those who heard him. Their crests of false curls drooped; the paint faded from their faces under the lashing hail of his words. They were crimson or leaden or sea-green according to their various temperaments—the complexion of Sire my Friend having undergone this last and most unbecoming change. And Dunoisse went on speaking, almost without a gesture, as a man whose bodily weakness compelled economy of breath and action.
“I was to have had a great reward of you for my services. One million one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, to be definite! Keep your stolen money! Could I buy back self-respect with the price of blood? As for you, you have won your Empire—have brought about the War you schemed and plotted for; you will take the field with Turkey and your Ally of England, shoulder to shoulder—side by side!... Ah!—you read Machiavelli at the Fortress of Ham to good purpose!... You grew more than violets upon the ramparts, Monseigneur! You matured plans for revenge.... And you will have your honeyed vengeance,” said Dunoisse, in that distinct, rasping whisper. “And gall will mingle with the sweetness as you suck it. For those old associates of yours—thosemen of the Reform and Carlton Clubs of London—will say of you: ‘By God!—this Emperor of France is a damned scoundrel!’ And, by God!—they will be right!”
The sentence, spoken in English, cut like a tandem-whip. As it hissed through the stagnant, perfumed, tobacco-laden atmosphere of the room, the speaker drew his sword. Sire my Friend recoiled and cried out at the sharp hiss of the steel, and de Fleury, brave as a bulldog, sprang before his master instantly. But Dunoisse only balanced the weapon a moment with the deftness of a master of fence, ere, with an effort that taxed his feebleness to the utmost, he snapped the tarnished steel across his thin knee, and said, as he threw the pieces down clattering at the dainty buckled feet of Imperial Majesty:
“My military oath of allegiance was to the President, not to the Emperor. I will serve you no longer, be that understood! And—though the work I have done has been fatally well done!—in so far as it be possible, I will unmesh the net I have woven.... Therefore be warned, Monseigneur!”
With this, as a man might shake off from his hand some venomous insect, he dropped the loosely-fitting signet ring upon the carpet, ground it with a sudden, savage impulse underneath his heel, and went out, leaving them staring and short of breath.
A moment later, Sire my Friend, whose complexion of sea-green had suffered change to a congested purple, staggered and clutched at nothing, and fell down frothing in an epileptic fit.
By the advice of Persigny—who had seen him before in that pitiable condition—they moved the furniture away from his vicinity, and left his devil to use him at its will. And presently he came to, staring and shuddering, with a bitten glove between his teeth; and was very feeble and exhausted, and full of fears lest the Empress had seen him thus afflicted. But by-and-by, when reassured, and restored, and renovated, he was able to interview the Chief of his Secret Police, and give orders for an arrest....
He was peculiarly benevolent, urbane and smiling, an hour later, when, to the united strains of “God Save the Queen” and “Partant Pour La Syrie,” he entered the fairyland of blue-and-white striped awnings, blue carpets, gold-tasseled hangings of pink satin, and elfin grottos ofgreen gauze, full of palms and hot-house roses, illuminated with pink, blue and yellow Chinese lights. Leading the beautiful Empress—who rested her gloved hand on the happy arm of the Duke of Bambridge—followed by the French and British Commanders-in-Chief, with their Staffs, his brothers and his uncle, he looked—or might have with the addition of a few more inches—every inch an Emperor.
And not only an Emperor, said the Imperial Press Organs—a philanthropic lover of mankind, who—supported by Great Britain, the nursing-mother of infant nations—was about to carry out a war in the cause of Freedom, Justice, and the Rights of Man against Irresponsible Despotism.
Amidst the general joyousness, the depression of de Morny—that usually light-hearted cynic—was curiously apparent. Lord Dalgan noticed this, and commented upon it in his exquisite, polished French:
“By my faith, Monseigneur!” returned de Morny, in the English language, “I cannot deny it, I am confoundedly hipped to-night! Absolutely, I am like the Princess in the Suabian fairy legend—there is a rose-leaf under my twenty-ninth feather-bed. Why? I am envious—absolutely envious! I have seen a poor man throw away one million one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs for the privilege of enjoying a luxury that I, who am a rich man, cannot afford.”
“Really! And what is that costly form of indulgence?” asked my Lord.
De Morny answered, with a curious smile on that well-bred, rakish face of his:
“The luxury of telling the truth!”
He could not afford it, though he would have liked it.... It was not yet convenient to break with Sire my Friend....
And so the Monster Ball spun and whirled itself out, dancing becoming public after the departure of the Imperial Party and their guests. At three in the morning when even young and handsome faces looked fagged, and old ones witchlike and ghastly; when the real flowers were faded, and the imitation ones dusty and limp; when the elfin grottos were revealed as garish shams which no respectablefairy would have dreamed of being seen in—when the innumerable colored lanterns hung from trees and twinkling amongst shrubberies looked pale and mean and sickly in the light of coming day; a prison-van, bolted on a railway-truck—having a carriage containing an Imperial aide-de-camp and two Commissaries of Police in front of it, and another full of gendarmerie behind it—was being whirled by a special engine into the Northern Department of the Somme.
At the station where the van was unbolted from the railway-truck an escort of Lancers waited; also a one-horse brougham, an open brake, drawn by a pair; and a couple of spare horses. These being harnessed to the van, the aide, after exchanging a sentence or two with the commander of the cavalry escort, stepped into the brougham, followed by the police-officers, who modestly took the front seat. Then at a curt word of command the party put itself in motion, and clattered and clinked and rolled away.
And presently the prison-van, with its wheeled and mounted guardians, passed—with a challenge from a sentry and the giving of a countersign at each—over two drawbridges, and clattered and rolled—the prisoner judged by the damp chill and the hollow echo—under a heavy archway of stone. And then, with the grinding of heavy iron wards in locks, and screaming of solid iron bolts in stony groovings, the van came to a halt; the steps were banged down, the door was opened; and the yawning jailers who had traveled with the prisoner unlocked his narrow cell.
Dunoisse was invited to get out. He moved his cramped limbs with difficulty, and descended the iron steps in the gay sunshine of an April morning, which painted long blue shadows on a lofty wall centered by a massive gateway with a square watch-tower, across the stones of a flagged courtyard.
Two huge round towers flanked the south and west angles of the courtyard. A block of buildings was upon his right hand that looked like a Barracks. Another, smaller, on his left, was probably the dwelling of the Commandant. A gray-haired, stout man in the undress uniform of a field-officer of the Line came out of the house, saluted the Imperial aide, and returned the salute of theofficer of the escort. He had a blue paper in his hand.
He said, addressing the prisoner after a brief colloquy with the Imperial Staff officer:
“You will be confined here during the pleasure of the Emperor.”
Dunoisse knew that meant for life. He lifted his haggard eyes as he asked the question:
“Where am I?”
The answer came:
“You are in the Fortress of Ham.”