And then—they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence, was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin Boisset.
"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of Seulvent. They will not return until the Prussians have left the neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these men when they are full of wine.... We will stop as we pass, and tell them what has happened.... Then you had better come back with me to my presbytery. The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be coffee and bread!"
"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there would not be even bread and coffee. But I have my hiding holes of which I tell nobody. And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could not say where they were!"
That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down. It stood next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good Curé's heart. Afterdéjeunerhe explained that he was going to visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.
He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand. P. C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.
Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen. The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered, staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty black. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand with something shining in it. The piece of gold given him by Juliette.
He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place. He followed, to find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry—a ladder that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against the whitewashed wall.
"Couldn't I do that? I'm a good deal stronger than, you are.... Halloa!... Lucky I was there!"
P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder. He said quite reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit of timber:
"Why have you followed me? Is it that you wish to speak to me privately? If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the nerves!"
P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.
"But certainly she shall have a Mass. Though five francs will be more than sufficient. Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find the necessary francs of change. You see, we are poor in this neighborhood ... it is to be expected!" The good Curé smiled, and added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of myconfrères—even richer than some of my superiors. Therefore, if you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer Mass." He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his features. Describe his person, if you can!" ...
P. C. Breagh recalled and described. When he had done, the Curé said, in a tone of quiet conviction:
"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is not only my superior.... He ranks above the angels.... Monsieur has spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"
Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C. Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into the worn flagstones. He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue were stiff. The priest went on:
"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars. As a Catholic, Monsieur has learned of him. But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur does not know?... A year before his holy death.... Since it has happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered.... He has succored the wounded.... He has appeared, just as he was when alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have departed in joy and peace.... In the world this will not be credited. It does not matter!... What matters is, that those who perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on behalf of souls.... He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven——"
He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:
"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!... How could I be so forgetful!... No! it is not to be replaced against the wall. It is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the edge of that trap-door.... Since Monsieur has been favored with a vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence. Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"
And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.
It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed it in.
"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.
"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the church below him at the earliest break of day.
Said the Curé:
"My child, it was I. A member of my parish was dying—I came to the church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle.... I forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence here had been betrayed!... But all is well! and a cart of brushwood will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its load when it is driven on. It is going to a farm near Audun—from there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed. It is said that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor, now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan." He added as white teeth flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully: "You will please yourself as to serving again! You have already suffered greatly for our country!"
The soldier said roughly:
"I would die for her with a good heart!... But I will not fight again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold and betrayed!"
"Well, well!...Au revoir, my child, and may Our Lord protect you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down the ladder. "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence, and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke. The curls of vapor can be seen rising between the shingles. I observed it when we had workmen here in Spring!"
Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder, unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear bright autumn air.
"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust where use did not maintain its brightness. "He was taken prisoner in yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift for himself, with others in the same condition. One of them—in whose company this man was—had concealed a pistol, and had the daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck—or General Moltke—I am not sure which! But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were massacred in cold blood. This man by a miracle—escaped!... How, I know not! He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover his resurrection from the grave."
They went back into the presbytery. The priest went to look for the fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece. She came out of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little queenly head.
Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:
"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded.... See you well, I would like to meet that man!"
"Why, Mademoiselle?"
"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"
He regarded her in silence. She went on almost with hardihood, throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed between their narrowed lids.
"See you well—if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to the man who saved France!"
Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist came before his sight. Through it he was aware of long eyes that gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh.... He saw that the underlip was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper disclosed teeth as white as curd.... Then he heard the silver voice say with a sigh in it:
"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty. Ah, Monsieur, if I but were!..."
She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers. As the amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw thrust out savagely, she thought:
"There is something of my mother in me—more than a little! How dared I scorn her—I, who can speak and look like this?" And she repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I but were!"
For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me. When the first Woman bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of men.
This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.
Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by their covert of black lashes.... Her will bent heavily on his, weakened by his worship of her. In another instant he would have asked what she wanted him to do.
But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the little crazy stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward which he had been drifting. In another moment the Curé came into the room. He had a knotted blue handkerchief in his hand, which weighed somewhat heavily. He said with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the knots, and took out a little pile of silver:
"Here behold my savings bank! Your fifteen francs, Mademoiselle!"
He was earnest to count them out and return them to her, and she was as earnest that the coins should not be given back.... But she could not deny her poverty when the good man charged her with it, saying:
"Accept the return of this money as a mortification salutary for the health of your soul!"
Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away under his cassock, and asked them:
"Where are you journeying together, my children? I have a reason for wishing to know!"
He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the memory of that strange look Juliette had cast upon him. The young man answered, glowing through his sunbrown:
"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"
The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and then sabots clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice cried from the door:
"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more 'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and folks by their right names!"
There was a terrible pause. Juliette was enduring agonies. The Curé pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed spectacles. Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:
"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old friend's only son. She told me that when we were washing up the coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there.... When the Prussians came to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother. 'To celebrate my marriage,' she told me, 'because M. What's-his-name was there!'"
P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the stomach. His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly. His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was utterance. "Married!..." kept on ticking inside his head. "Married!..." and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper of a tolling bell. "You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the time!"
His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so wooingly. It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath their heavy fringes of black. The eyebrows were knitted, the pale lips set rigidly. The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked, plump and plain:
"You are really married? My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving herself?"
Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and raised clear, sorrowful eyes.
"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage. Now that I have returned, I shall await my husband here in France. My father esteemed him highly. He is M. Charles Tessier. He lives in the Rue de Provence, in the town of Versailles."
Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined to ask. We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle had crashed into dust and brickbats. One glance at his face, sharp as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought. But if he had seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied again, defiantly. Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed so.... She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of Charles Tessier. Ah, Heaven!... The thought was more unwelcome than ever it had been.
Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave young Englishman. Would he have been in such haste to break his daughter's heart?... And—ah, Heaven!—again, if this burning of her boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?
He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity. He was so straightforward and honest, one could not guard the heart. When he had thought her dead, how piteously he had cried to her, "Juliette! Juliette!..." When she had crept from under the bed the lance had plunged through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her and caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and misery, she had known a wonderful thrill....
"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had strained her to his broad breast. Was it wicked, was it unnatural in one so newly bereaved of the noblest and dearest of all fathers, to have been taken by storm in those moments of desolation—to have dreamed since then of the rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!... If our very own!... Never anyone's but yours...."?
Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such thoughts, was she not now punished? She had dealt with her own slight arm the blow that had shattered the fabric of her dreams as well as his.... She would never again see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother; never—against all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial affairs of a young French girl of good family—be hugged in that rude, possessive, British way. But what loneliness, what terror, what danger had driven her into the arms that enfolded.... Besides, she would atone by marrying Charles Tessier. A tepid future passed by the side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her.... She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even while she mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of him who had planned it, she would embrace such a future with resignation.... It flashed upon her now, with blinding clearness, that not only must the future be embraced, but the man....
"Tear the picture.... Forget the dream!" The words; of de Bayard's letter came back to her.
Ah, well!—she had done with pictures and dreams.... For her, realities. The comrade looked as though Reality had hit him smashingly. She barely recognized his cheerful voice as he answered to some leading question put by the Curé:
"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame. It would be risky for her to attempt to return alone to Versailles."
She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded. She bent her little head and said with an admirable assumption of newly wedded dignity:
"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable. I will accept his offer with gratitude. When my husband learns of his great goodness, he too will thank him. Alas! at this moment my poor Charles is far away!..."
She sought for a tear, and found more than she had expected. For a whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops burst from those wonderful eyes.
She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy Curé's stout person, and dropped her arms upon the table, and her head on them, and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed.... The priest beckoned Breagh from the study. They were going to make arrangements for the journey. Horrible Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled over the prone, abandoned head.... Madame was going to start early to-morrow morning.... Allowing for the disorganization of the railway service, Madame would reach Versailles by noon of the same day. The husband of Madame would presently arrive to find her waiting for him. Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous reunion. Let Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of St. Christopher, patron of all travelers. The first little male cherub that should bless the union of Madame and Monsieur would naturally be christened by the name of the good Saint.
They drove in a country cart to Etain over roads bestrewn for the most part with thedébrisof the falling Empire, and there caught a train starting for Verdun. It was crammed with wounded French soldiers lying on straw in trucks and horse boxes. Women jostled one another at the doors of these, to supply the poor sufferers with soup and fruit, bread and coffee. The news of the retirement of Bazaine upon Metz was in every mouth, although, thanks to the cutting by Uhlans of the telegraph line between Metz and Thionville, the Emperor did not receive the Marshal's wire until the 22nd.
The Warlock had lost no time. Already the blockade of the doomed fortress city was so far completed that only the most daring French scouts were able to worm their way through the enemy's investing lines.
For, even as the octopus, desirous of increasing his family, throws off a spare tentacle which becomes another octopus, from the First and Second Armies of United Germany had been evolved a Fourth Army of Six Corps under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, whose Advance of Guard Cavalry were already over the Meuse.
The Army of the Prussian Crown Prince had traversed the roads south of Toul and entered the basin of the Ornain. The King of Prussia, with Bismarck and Moltke, had started to march on Paris through the dusty white plains of Champagne.
His Great Headquarters had already reached Bar-le-Duc. One of his scouting squadrons of Uhlans had captured a French courier at Commercy. Thus Moltke had learned that the mounted regiments of Canrobert's Corps had been left behind at the Camp of Châlons, and that Paris was being placed in a state of defense to resist an investment expected hourly.
On this very day the vast Camp had been abandoned, the Imperial pavilions, the mess houses, officers' quarters and kitchens were blazing merrily, the lines of rustic baraques usually occupied by the troops were marked out by crackling hedges of fire. While MacMahon, at his camp near Rheims, was torn between Ministerial orders emanating from the Empress, insisting on the immediate relief of Bazaine, and his own conviction that the order of march should be back by the directest route to defend the menaced capital.
Said the Man of Iron to Roon, whiffing a huge cigar as the steady downpour of rain swirled down the gutters and drenched the Bodyguard on duty outside the King's Headquarters at Bar-le-Duc:
"We barricade the straight road that leads to Metz. Will the fellow face the risks of a circuitous march leading him near the Belgian frontier? I should be personally obliged to him to decide quickly.... One does not desire to linger in a Capua as dismal as this."
Bismarck-Böhlen brought him a telegram. He was about to open it when the Warlock hastily entered the sitting room that served as ante-chamber, flourishing a copy ofLe Temps, issued in Paris on the previous day.
"A Uhlan of the Advance has got me this paper. He took it from the person of a respectable bourgeois at whose house in Cligny he and his comrades called to drink a drop of wine. Judging it a welcome gift to me, the brave fellow rode here to bring it."
"There is wine of another kind on those pages," said the Minister, pointing to the journal with a smile.
Moltke read from the blood-stained paper:
"'The speeches delivered yesterday at the Chamber are unanimous in the declaration that the French people will be disgraced forever if the Army of the Rhine be not relieved. The dispatches received during the sitting of yesterday's Privy Council, from the Prefecture of Police, the Ministry of War and of the Interior, were of a nature to cause apprehension of the keenest. But the disposition of the people of Paris can be ascertained by any person whose ears are not stuffed with Court cotton-wool. Do not these shouts of "Dethronement!"—these cries of "A Republic! A Republic!" become louder every day?'"
He added:
"This bears out the text of Palikao's intercepted wire of yesterday to the Emperor; and the second from the Empress, virtually saying: 'Abandon Bazaine and Paris is in revolt!'..."
Commented the Minister:
"The Empress-Regent talks like a young woman. Palikao argues like an old one—the speakers in the Chamber gabble like a pack of old gossips, not one of whom looks beyond the end of her own nose. Paris was in revolution at the beginning of August. She will be a full-blown Republic before Christmas, whether Bazaine be abandoned or not."
Moltke said, helping himself from his silver snuffbox:
"MacMahon has not the courage to resist a consensus of quackers. He will march east and uncover the Paris road. I may say I had already drawn out private tables of marches which would thwart him in any case. What have you there? A wire in Secret Code?"
Bismarck answered:
"It is in Russian, with which language the sender knows me to be acquainted. He is an agent of our Secret Service, who combines the trade of wool stapler with the profession of notary, and holds the post of Sub-Prefect in the town of Rethel. He communicates by private wire that the Emperor has telegraphed the Prince Imperial that the junction with Bazaine will not be attempted, and that the march of the Army of Châlons will be directed upon Sedan. He states that when he quitted Rheims to-day the Imperial Headquarters had left for Tourteron...."
"Ei, ei! Is he trustworthy?" asked the Warlock, putting away the silver box.
The Minister answered succinctly:
"The intelligence he supplies is usually worth the money he is paid for it."
He went on:
"He has got into touch with the Roumanian Straz, who has not received cash for some dirty work he did in July at Sigmaringen, and who judges it advisable—Napoleon Bonaparte Grammont & Co. being insolvent—to transfer his services to the opposite firm.... He adds that Straz possesses, or says that he possesses, free access to the Prince Imperial. He appears to think our interests would be served by kidnapping the boy."
"Would they?" asked Moltke.
The Minister raised his shaggy brows, and answered smilingly:
"You are acquainted with the Countess's views in connection with the youngest Bonaparte. If the Queen does not want him to hand her tea and comb her lap dog, why should I not take M. Lulu home as a present to my wife?"
"You are jesting!" said the Warlock, shaking the wise old head in the scratch wig. "You have told this stinking rogue that decent German men make not war upon women or children.... When the time comes that we are guilty of such things, United Germany will be near her fall."
"Her barometer predicts a rise," said the Minister dryly, "at this particular moment."
"With God's help, we shall fulfill the prediction!" returned the Warlock, going to a table where lay spread a map on a comprehensive scale of an inch to a mile. "We will talk over this with the King, when the Crown Prince and Von Blumenthal come over from Ligny. It will be wiser to delay the movement on Paris, and hit this weather cock of a Marshal with all our forces. So, he marches his Army on the Meuse!So'o!..."
And he hummed a bar of the little song about the weeping flowers and the shining starlets, as he set the mental machinery in motion that resulted in the Grand Right Wheel.
The closed shutters of the Tessier house in the Rue de Provence gave that pleasant, airy, well-kept residence standing behind its high garden walls of stone-faced brick, festooned with autumn-tinted creepers, an unoccupied and cheerless air.
Repeated rings at the bell of the white-painted gate of wrought iron upon the right of the heavyporte cochèretopped by the lozenged archway, elicited a caretaker in the person of the wife of the gardener-coachman, who cried out joyfully upon recognizing one of the ringers, and broke into a spate of words:
"Mademoiselle! ... Madame Charles! A thousand pardons for the error! But a return so unexpected. Nothing is ready...." She queried, her eyes becoming circular as they drank in the fact that the newly-married wife of her master had arrived in company of a strange young gentleman in a shabby brown suit of foreign make, and a straw hat decidedly the worse for wear: "Madame Tessier has not accompanied you?... Or Monsieur Charles?... Nothing has happened?" Upon being assured that her employers were well, and still in Belgium, she raised her eyes piously, and heaved a sigh of relief. "In these days such terrible things happen!" sighed the gardener-coachman's wife. "No one knows who the Prussians will not kill next!... Though, what with the soldiers that have gone away—regiments and regiments marching with their bands!—and the guns—thousands of guns rolling and rolling!—one would say that France possessed enough men.... But who knows! One can feel the fears of the people like a dark cloud blackening the sky.... They say that at Meudon the trees have been cut down and trenches dug, and beautiful villas blown up with gunpowder that the Germans may not live in them when they come. Of what use, then, the great cannon that break the windows when they fire them from the Forts of Issy and Meudon, Vanvres and Mont Valérien, if they cannot keep such people back?"
She had looked at the young man who accompanied Madame Charles as she put her question. He answered, with appreciation of the shrewdness prompting the question:
"One wishes one could answer that! But it is all true about the trenches and so on.... All the main roads leading north and west and east from Paris have been cut up in the same way. And the bridges have been mined—but they will not blow them up yet. They will wait until the Prussians come!"
"Grand Dieu! And all our hospitals here are full of wounded soldiers. They arrive in trains or wagons every hour.... People wait at the railway stations and at the barriers in crowds to see them. Sometimes one cries out: 'My brother!' or 'My husband!'—or 'My son!'..."
The wide mouth of the little woman widened in a grimace of misery. She gulped and sniffed, and the tears began to tumble from her beady black eyes. "My brother Michel has been killed!... My sister has received an official letter that says so. Also my husband's nephew, Jean Jacques—the dear youth who served Madame Tessier so faithfully.... Madame Charles must remember him going about the house in his striped jacket, cleaning the silver and sweeping and polishing the parquet.... And now my poor Potier, whom Madame Charles cannot have forgotten.... At fifty years of age, he has been called to serve again!"
Her poor Potier was even then marching with MacMahon's hundred thousand toward Montmedy by Mézières, and the end that was to meet him there, as the little woman dried her eyes with her blue apron, and bestirred herself to welcome one whom she firmly believed to be her young master's wife.
"No luggage! Madame has returned without luggage!" she commented mentally, as the driver of the hack vehicle that had brought Madame and her companion from the station was paid and jingled away.
Then as she shut the outer gate and locked it she realized that the companion of Madame Charles was a foreigner. She could hear the pair conversing in an unknown jargon as they stood together near the terrace steps. Upon which the perplexity of honest Madame Potier was banished by an effort of simple reasoning. The strange young man would be a Belgian—an employee of M. Charles. M. Charles had determined, all the world knew, to engage a resident bookkeeper. This must be the Belgian bookkeeper who had accompanied Madame. For his manner was humble to dejectedness, as became a dependent, and he looked at Madame with extreme wistfulness. He was actually saying:
"This means good-bye, I suppose, doesn't it?..."
Juliette returned, with her heart wavering in her like a wind-blown taper flame:
"If you desire it, Monsieur, of course it is good-bye!"
He perused the gravel walk with an appearance of great interest.
It was extraordinary that neither he nor Madame had brought any luggage.... Madame Potier fairly writhed with curiosity to learn the reason why. She could restrain herself no longer. She cried, madly clashing the gate keys:
"But the luggage, Madame! ... The carriage has driven away without depositing it. What of the trunks, imperials, portmanteaux, bonnet boxes that Madame possessed when she went away?..."
She was a little, voluble, excitable Frenchwoman, with shiny black hair, bright, snapping black eyes, and a hectic spot in the center of each cheek. As yet her environment had not brought home to her what War meant in reality. When she had wept for her brother and her nephew by marriage, and at parting with her husband, she had relapsed into her accustomed round of duties, not unpleasantly varied by her newer responsibilities as guardian of her mistress's empty dwelling. Like many other excellent women of her type, she could not read or write, and relied on local news imparted by her gossips and bits of intelligence left by the baker with his bread rolls, or served by the woman who brought the morning's milk.
Now Madame Charles turned to her and told her:
"The boxes and imperials are left behind in Belgium, dear Madame Potier. As for the articles I brought with me, they have been torn to pieces by the lancers of M. de Bismarck. Also the luggage of this gentleman, who has, like myself, nothing left but the clothes that he is wearing. Thank him, for had he not protected me, I should never have reached this house!"
"Great Heaven!" Little Madame Potier threw her hands and eyes heavenward. "What wretches! What terrible dangers Madame has surmounted!... What horrors one hears of!—what miseries and sufferings!... Death is everywhere.... One would say it was the end of the world! But still there is hope, is not there, Madame?... Our glorious Army..."
Juliette turned a snow-white face upon the eager woman, and lifted a little, tragic hand. She said, and in that tone and with that look most feared and dreaded by the man who loved her:
"Our glorious Army has been betrayed and massacred! With these eyes I who speak to you have seen vast tracts of country covered with the slain!"
Madame Potier winced and drew herself together. Her black eyes glared. The red spots sank out of her sharp face. And Juliette went on:
"I traversed one of these huge fields of carnage. Many Germans were there—but most of the dead were our French soldiers.... And in the silence you heard their blood running, and the earth lapping it like a great thirsty dog!..."
In the throat of the other woman, listening, an hysterical knot began growing. You could see it working as her dry lips twitched. She held her breath as though to keep back a scream.
"I sought among all these dead men for my father," said Juliette. "And I found him!... His dead hand beckoned me from a mountain of corpses.... I would have known it without the ring that he always wore.... And I went to him and sat beside him, and asked God to let me die also.... And a sword seemed to cut my soul from my body.... I grew cold—and all was blackness about me!... I felt no more ... I breathed no more ... I thought: 'This must be death!' Then a voice spoke to me.... I was too far away to answer. It called me loudly—and I came to life again.... I rose up.... I saw the face of the man who had called me.... And then I knew why I must not die just yet!"
She laughed, and so strangely that Madame Potier cried out in terror. She would have rushed at the girl and clutched her but for Breagh's strong interposing hand. He said in her ear in the bad French she took for Belgian:
"Madame has traveled many miles, fasting, and she has suffered a great bereavement.... Do not question her, but go and make ready her apartment, and prepare food for her. Hot soup—she needs that before all!"
The little woman addressed looked sharply at the speaker, then mounted the two steps leading to the terrace, scuttled across it in front of the shuttered windows of the drawing-room and billiard-room, descended the steps upon the other side, and vanished in the direction of the basement kitchen door.
Then P. C. Breagh, wondering at his own daring, stretched out a hand and touched Juliette's. It was very cold. He lifted it gently and led her unresisting down the ivy-bordered path that led into the pleasance.
For she must not be left alone in this mood, and the garden was still, and scented, and beautiful in the noonday sunshine. Its beds of autumn flowers blazed from their setting of smooth and still verdant turf. The great wistaria on the stable buildings was magnificent in trails of fading purple blossoms. The oaks were browning, the chestnuts shedding their yellow fans. The stately limes were bleached pale golden, the tall acacias were already stripped quite bare.
It was not yet the season of song for thrush and blackbird, but the robin's sweet shrill twitter came from the heart of a hawthorn, marvelously laden with gorgeous crimson fruit. The breast of the bird, not yet attired in fullest winter plumage, showed orange as japonica berries beside the ripe haws' splendid hue.
Said P. C. Breagh, trying to speak lightly and naturally:
"Look at him! What a pretty little beggar! Nobody ever told me you had robins in France!..." Then as the bird cocked his round bright eye and hopped to a higher twig, and Juliette's pale face remained unchanged, and her fixed stare blankly ignored him, her sorrowful friend cried out in a passion of entreaty:
"Juliette! Juliette, take care! For the love of God, don't yield to this! Oh, Juliette! have pity upon others, even if you have none on yourself!"
The cry touched a chord that responded in vibration. The stiff waxen mask softened, and became the face he knew. She looked at him, and her eyes were no longer fixed and glassy. She asked in wonder:
"What do you want me to do?"
Trees hid them from the house with its closed slatted shutters. They were near a rustic seat that was under the great tulip tree. Breagh led her to the seat, made her sit down, and sat himself beside her. He made no effort to retain the little hand. "It is not mine," he said to himself, as he looked at it, and then his heart jolted, and stood still.... Where was her wedding ring?... Didn't French married ladies wear the plain gold circlet? Of course they did! Then why?... Came her faint, sad voice again:
"What is it I might do and do not do, for myself and others? Tell me, Monsieur, for I do not like to be unkind!"
He said, trying to speak clearly and unemotionally: "It is because you love so greatly those who are near you that I ask you to be kind to these and to yourself. You have suffered a great loss, you brood upon it to your injury.... You dream of revenge upon a man, high-placed and powerful, whom you accuse of having brought about the War."
She had taken off the black silk veil that she had worn as head covering. A dry leaf fluttered down from the tulip tree and crowned her splendid coils of mist-black hair. Her thin arched brows were drawn together and frowning; from the dark caverns that Grief had hollowed round them looked eyes that were cold and hard and brilliant as blue diamonds. She asked in almost a whisper:
"And if I dream ... and accuse ... am I not justified?... Because he saved your life, do you take his part?"
Breagh answered her with a sudden spurt of anger:
"I take no part. I speak for your own good. If a woman as frail and sensitive as you are yields to the promptings of a hate so overwhelming, a time comes when she cannot, if she would, control them or rule herself.... When voices sound in her ears, urging her to deeds of violence, and she cannot silence them by any prayers.... Then she goes away into a strange dim country peopled with shadows—lovely or queer, strange or awful. And that is the country of Madness, where live the insane.... Even those who love her as I—as your friends and your husband love you!—can never reach her there!"
The pleading seemed to touch her. Two great tears over-brimmed her pure pale underlids and fell upon her shabby black gown. She said, trembling a little:
"You are very good to have so much solicitude for me. I thank you very humbly. It is true that I have sustained a terrible wound, and that it rankles—is that the right word? My nature is not gentle—not amiable!—I long to strike back when I am wounded.... When those I love are hurt..." She stopped and controlled herself with a visible effort, then resumed: "I have it in me to be pitiless! See you well, there is something of my mother in me!"
"Of your mother?..."
He echoed the words in dismay that was almost ludicrous.... He had never asked whether Juliette possessed a mother or not. Now he looked to the house, expecting one of the shuttered French windows to open, anticipating the appearance of a middle-aged lady arrayed in mourning crape and weepers, and Juliette followed and understood his look. She said, with sorrowful meaning:
"Where friends of my father live. Monsieur, you do not find my mother. She is very beautiful, but not good, not noble, as he!... She left him many years ago, when I was an infant. See! I could not have been higher than that!" She measured with her hand above the turf the height of the baby of five years, with hair that had been silky and yellow as newly hatched chickens' down. She said, her clear, transparent face darkening with the shadow that swept across her memory: "Before I encountered you at Gravelotte I had passed through a terrible experience. This lady—of whom I dread to speak!—was thrown across my path. She did not reveal to me that she was my mother, when I quitted Brussels in her company.... She represented herself as the wife of an officer who had been wounded. She told me that my father was a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians. She took me to Rethel, that I might lay my case before the Prince Imperial, and beg him to obtain my father's release."
P. C. Breagh looked at her doubtfully, fearing—what he most feared for her. She said, drawing a folded envelope from the bosom of her black school dress:
"Never shall I forget how graciously Monseigneur received me. Here is a little keepsake he gave me with his own hand.... You shall hold it in yours, because you are my friend, and Monseigneur would permit it.... No one else, because no one deserves it save you!"
And she exhibited with dainty pride the splinter of rusty scrap iron. The envelope bore a small Imperial crown in gold, with the initial "E" beneath.... It was directed in violet ink and in a handwriting pointed and elegantly feminine, to S. A. the Prince Imperial, with the Great Headquarters of the Imperial Army, at the Prefecture of Metz.
"He is so brave!... He wanted to join M. de Bazaine and fight the Prussians. He stamped ... he wept ... he suffered such chagrin when the telegram came from the Emperor.... No! I must not tell you of the telegram.... My Prince said: 'Mademoiselle shall hear it because she is discreet!'..."
She folded away her treasure in the envelope that bore the Empress's handwriting, and hid it away again in its sweet nest close to her innocent heart. Life and vivacity were hers again as she descanted upon the graces and gifts of her Imperial princeling, and P. C. Breagh listened, grateful for the change in her. The shadow came back for a moment as she told him:
"And when I descended to the vestibule, Madame had gone away.... She had been seized with faintness in the moment of our arrival, when she had encountered a stranger passing through the hall.... Then I went back to the hotel, and crept up to my room quietly. Madame—whom I had discovered to be my mother!—was engaged with a visitor.... I do not know at all who he was. But I heard him say, on the other side of the door that was between us ... 'When she comes, you shall present me to the little Queen of Diamonds!' And he laughed....Mon Dieu!how strange a laugh!... It made me feel cold. It makes me cold even now to remember it.... But I do not think I have been really warm since the night upon which I found the portrait, and my mother said: 'The discovery was inevitable! Now, with your leave, I am going to sleep!'"
With such truth did she render the very tone of the sumptuous Adelaide's languid irony that P. C. Breagh started as though he had been stung. Somewhere he had met someone ... a woman who spoke like that?... Who was she? Where had they encountered?... He beat his brains to evoke some reply, in vain. And Juliette went on:
"It does me good to tell you this, Monsieur, though I thought at first I would not. You will understand how terrible it was to discover in this lady, who had deceived me, the mother whom I have believed dead until a few months ago. There was something in her very beauty, and ah! she is so beautiful!—that made me regard her with terror.... See you, I prayed to Our Blessed Lady for aid to overcome that terror. Then at the daybreak, I rose and went to her bed. When I saw her sleeping, I think I feared her more than ever. The face can reveal so much, Monsieur, in sleep. And hers was a sleep uneasy, and troubled by visions.... Without waking she said a thing so strange.... 'Only a woman of fashion would be guilty of such infamy!' ... What made you start so violently, Monsieur?"
For P. C. Breagh had jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet. His mouth screwed itself into the shape of a whistle, his eyes rounded unbecomingly. He remembered when and where he had heard that utterance—in the resonant accents of the Man of Iron, and addressed to the adventurous beauty encountered at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.
What were the words that had preceded the sentence, scathing in their irony, terrible in their implied contempt?
"It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus Libertina.... Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy.... Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!"
And an English boy had picked it up, and seen the devastating change wrought in that softly tinted mask of sensuous beauty, by Conscience, roused to anguish by the vitriol splash of scorn.
So the Duessa of the Wilhelm Strasse was Madame de Bayard! How strange the chance encounter that had brought them together in that house! What was the bargain she had hoped to drive with Bismarck? What had she intended when she had taken her daughter to Rethel? Who was the man who had been waiting to be presented to the little Queen of Diamonds?... And how true had been the instinct that had warned the girl of danger, whose nature her Convent-bred innocence made it impossible for her to conceive?
She was speaking:
"Do not think me wicked or insensible, Monsieur. I am deeply sensible of all your goodness!... I know very well that there is truth in what you say!... You are noble, candid, magnanimous.... You do not comprehend what it is to hate so that it is torture ... like fire burning here, here, and here!..."
She touched her slight bosom and her throat with the joined finger-tips of her small hands, shielded her eyes and forehead with them an instant, then swept them wide apart. A curious gesture, and notable, in its suggestion of surging overwhelming emotion, and the dominance of an impulse obsessing in its evil strength.
"Here where it is so quiet I shall recover in a little.... I shall become calmer.... I shall learn to sleep again.... You cannot imagine how much I wish to sleep, Monsieur!... But when I lie down it is as though great doors in my brain were thrown wide open. There is music ... and processions of people come pouring, pouring through.... There are voices that make great clamor—there are hands that wave to me and beckon. But I clench my own hands and lie still—so very still! I pray to Our Lord that one figure may not pass among the others, for then I know I shall have to get up and follow him.... I cry to Our Lady to cover my eyes with Her cool hands, that I may not see if he does come. But always he passes; walking or driven in a chariot—riding a great horse, or borne upon the shoulders of guards. And then I resist no more, for it is useless! I wake!—and I am standing in the middle of my room!"
Said P. C. Breagh, comprehending the situation: "In a word, you are suffering from overstrain and consequent insomnia. And I wish I were a full-blown M.D., because I think I should know what to do. But you will let me prescribe the doctor, if I may not undertake the case, won't you? What's that? Who's there?"
Something like a gurgling laugh had sounded behind them, and Juliette glanced round, and back at Carolan with something of the old gayety in her eyes.
"It is the Satyr of the pool, where Madame Tessier grows her water plants. He laughs like that when the water bubbles in his throat."
She rose and followed a little path leading through a shrubbery of lilac and syringa. Beyond rose the ivy-hung and creeper-covered eastern boundary wall of the pleasance. From the grinning mouth of the Satyr mask wrought in gray stone the slender spring spouted no longer. It trickled from a hole in the pipe behind the mask, and yet the laugh sounded at intervals as of old. The wall below the mask was wet, and green with a slimy moss-growth, fed by the dampness; the ferns that bordered the pool, the water plants that grew in it, had suffered from the diminution of their supply. The brook had diminished to a slender trickle winding among stones crowned with dry and withering mosses. Juliette cried out at the spectacle in sheer dismay.
What would Madame say if she knew how spoiled was this, her cherished bit of sylvan beauty? Never mind. When she returned all should be found in order of the best. The kitchen garden, perforce neglected since the departure of M. Potier, should be weeded diligently. The dead roses should be snipped off with loving care, the withered blossoms pulled from the sheaths of the flaming gladioli.... The place needed a mistress, that was plain to Mademoiselle de Bayard's order-loving eye.
"We will work here!..." she said, and almost clapped her hands at the thought of the pleasant labor waiting them. "Me, I adore gardening! And you also—do you not, Monsieur?..."
Could P. C. Breagh deny? He cried with a hot flush of joy at the thought of long days of sweet companionship: "Indeed I do!... and of course I will, Madame!"
"'Madame!...'"
She had nearly betrayed the truth, but she nipped her stern upper lip close down upon its rosy fellow.... Was she not married? Nearly, if not quite....
So nearly that until M. Charles appeared with Madame, she would maintain the character of a recent bride. It would be better not to rekindle in the gray eyes of Monica's brother that fire that had blazed there so fiercely a few hours before.
How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of? In January they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and had spent together not quite three days.... But what days! to brand themselves upon the memory. After that morning on the bloody field of Gravelotte—that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of Madame Guyot—that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be ever anything but friends?... Close friends ... dear comrades, linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of experiences unforgettable by both.... What would Life be like when one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of Monica's brother?... Juliette did not dare to question. The thought of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.
Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming Madame served with the best that could be got. A lentil soup—an omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden. One would do better later, let Madame only wait.... The apartment of Madame Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian gentleman.... Or—since that room was dismantled for cleaning purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining ... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage? She would guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?... Had they not slept in that bed for ten years past?... Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....
The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh. And from that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker, began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked nothing better than that it should last.
It was exquisite autumn weather. They rose early, and passed out of the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve. Or they would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée. Then they would come back todéjeuner, laid on a table under the trees on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or talk. But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two months they never exchanged a word about the War.
It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his practicing degree in Medicine, and under thisrégimethe shadow that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day. He had taken Madame Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of her master. She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her. Sleep returned, strength revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less poignant. She could look back upon the happiness of their old life together without the anguish that rends the heart.
Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum necessary for housekeeping. Under the able management of the hectic little woman, a very little money went a long way. Such butter, such cheese of Brie, such excellent bread, milk and cream, such country chickens, such fruit, and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not have been better served. The reward of Madame Potier was to see her handiwork vanish under the combined onslaughts of Madame Charles and Monsieur.... She waited upon them at table, and joined in their conversation, after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.
As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an affection for her young mistress, she developed cunning of a wholly lovable sort. The first time she heard her idol laugh, she clapped her hands with rapture. Another day, in pursuance of a stratagem she had elaborated, she placed upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant boast:
"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred that no living woman could cookragoûtof veal except his wife!"
She whipped off the cover. Madame Charles helped Monsieur in silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played into Madame Potier's hands. For he sniffed approval, and said, as she set his sizzling hot plate before him:
"M. Potier was quite right! If the woman lives who can cook a betterragoût, I've never met her, Madame!"
Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at the head of the table. Her sloping shoulders sloped terribly, her upper lip was preternaturally long. She helped herself to a very little of the dish before her, and began to eat without perceptible enthusiasm. Madame Potier stood back and watched her, her red hands on the hips that were embraced by her apron of blue stuff. She said:
"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten themenusshe used to prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le Colonel." She crossed herself at the mention of the dead man's name.
Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of her. She laid down her knife and fork. P. C. Breagh scowled savage reproof at Madame Potier. But Madame, at first overwhelmed, recovered herself. She went on, as though she had never broken off:
"Menuscomposed of excellent—but excellent dishes!... What a pity to think that Madame Charles cannot make them now!—Look you, to cook well is an art that may be easily forgotten!... Hey, Madame is not eating to-day!"
Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:
"There is a little too much sugar in theragoût, dear Madame Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says—excellent!"
"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar——" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him, figuratively.
"Who does not put sugar? Will Monsieur answer me?"
The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's. And the silvery accents of Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:
"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases you—the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt—these are due to sugar—burnt and added at the last moment. But one should use it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"
"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion, smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.
And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:
"Do you find it so incredible? Well, I will not boast now, but presently—you shall see!"
Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or crested wren. The twelve o'clockdéjeunerwas memorable, the five o'clock dinner a marvel, from thecroûte au potto thesole au gratin, and from the sole to thefilet aux champignons! There werebeignetsafterward—crisp, adorable, light as bubbles. P. C. Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled. Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling eyes.
Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of thin filmy black. Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin. Her dainty slimness was emphasized by the absence of all ornament. Her marvelous black hair, fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled temples with its dusky coils. When she lifted a slender arm to thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.
She did not look as though she had been toiling in a kitchen among casseroles and stew pots. Rather an elfin Queen of Faerie—a Titania robed in cobweb and moonbeams, whose smile sent a breeze of happiness flowing through the sad, empty places in one's heart. For the heart of the young man who loved her grew the emptier the more her sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow the more she showed herself to be naturally a daughter of joy.
She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling looks and lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations of gesture and tone and inflection were for him—and no other man.... This remembrance was always alive in Breagh to rear a barrier between him and his Infanta.... And other knowledge, too, was his, held in common with Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that he had not dared to share with Juliette.
But to-night he had realized that the truth could no longer be kept from her. She was cured. There could hardly be a relapse into the old conditions, even when she learned the dreadful truth. And even if risk there were, she must be told that truth by him to-night, or hear it from the lips of some stranger. It was a miracle that she had remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France—her beloved France.
"For seven weeks we have played together like two children on the brink of an open grave!" he said to himself. "Have I been right or wrong? Only Time can tell!"
Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across the hall, and down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee. Behind those little black beady eyes of hers she hoarded the knowledge of well-nigh unspeakable things. She had been faithful in guarding them from the knowledge of Juliette. But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You must speak to-night, Monsieur! We have done our best, but we two cannot keep from the poor little lady that to-day the King of Prussia will enter Versailles!"
She had given him a look as she had left the dining room that had said: "Remember!" P. C. Breagh, nerving himself to the ugly task, felt like one who seethes the kid in its mother's milk.
As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him on the forehead. He picked up the red carnation that had fallen upon the dessert plate before him. He inhaled its fragrance lingeringly, holding it so as to hide his mouth. Over it his troubled gray eyes scanned the face that was all alight with sparkling gayety. Why had Juliette thrown the flower? Why had she challenged him? She, who had up to this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness. Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?
She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the conviction that her grandmother would have been horrified. But it had been impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile at the brooding face with its smear of dark-red meeting eyebrows, and the short, square nose and the pleasant lips.
He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did not permit of a visit to the tailor. His new linen was spotless, and under the narrow turned-down collar he wore a loose-ended black silk tie. The bow was pulled out upon one side so much longer than upon the other that Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it. How careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young Englishman!
She was restless this evening. He had aroused her curiosity. Some hours after she had retired upon the previous night she had risen, and stolen barefooted to the open window that looked upon the moonlit garden, and parted the thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped out....
There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves down. A white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept closely cut. The countless clocks of the white town of royal palaces tinkled and chimed and belled and boomed out the witching hour of two.
Her room was on the east front, facing the garden.... A downward glance showed her that Breagh was pacing there.
Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black prints of footsteps upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed with dewdrops. The presence of so many reservoirs makes Versailles more than a trifle damp.
How rash!... How unwise! Did the young man desire a fever? Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her Colonel, for his health's sake, to a daughterly surveillance, had a lecture ready on the tip of her tongue. She might have spoken, had not the patroling figure come to a standstill, and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken his head and gone away.
"I've got to tell!—and I don't want to tell!—and I don't know how to tell, that's the bother of it!... Give it up!... For another night!"
Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake would have conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to the subject of his sore reflections, returning in a flutter of strange, sweet wonder, and expectation, to her recently vacated couch.
You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his miserable gray eyes looking at her out of the shadows in the corners. Those eyes could blaze in tigerish fashion when he was angry, for she had seen.... When she had crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death bed, they had flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....
Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms, and held against the heart that shook one with its beating.... Was it wicked to feel that one hated Charles Tessier? Was it unnatural, in these days of mourning, to think of anyone except her lost Colonel?... Was it not exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not want to say, and did not know how to say, no later than the following night?...
True—she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression that she was married, but she would explain that she had meant that she would be by and by.... Alas! what would her grandmother, that sainted woman, have said regarding this lapse from the way of truth?
But she certainly had not planned to throw the carnation. The missile hurled, she had been seized with paralyzing fright. The shade of her grandmother seemed to rise, appalling in its shocked propriety. One could almost hear her saying: "My unhappy child, you have become more like your mother than I could have believed, had I not seen!..."
Now in sheer desperation she mocked on, dissembling her terror.
"What is the matter? Why are you so dull anddistrait? Are you tired of living shut up in a garden? Answer me, I pray you, Monsieur!"
He looked at her, and his cleft chin squared itself, and his broad red eyebrows lowered into a line of determination. He said doggedly:
"The happiest time of my life has been spent shut up in this garden! I believe you know that very well!"
She burst into silver laughter and cried to him teasingly:
"But you did not look at all happy when I peeped at you in the night from my window. See! Thus, with the hands miles deep in the pockets, and the shoulders elevated to the tips of the ears!"
She jumped up and mimicked the slouching gait of the midnight cogitator, brilliantly and with fidelity, parading between the dinner table and the long windows that opened toward the lawn. He recognized himself, and reddened, while he laughed with vexation. He had never before seen her in this mood of Puck-like mischief. He had yet to become acquainted with another phase of Juliette.
"Did you learn to act so well at your Convent?" he asked her, and she answered with sudden gravity:
"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur.... It is a gift, of the good angels or the bad ones, which can be brought to perfection by use. To 'make' an artist of the stage is not possible. He or she is born ... and that is all I know...." She added: "When I make my appearance at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you abillet de faveur. Then you shall see acting. I promise you!"
She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held up her fairy finger, and smiled and sparkled at the bewildered young man.
"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the part of a grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put on wrinkles with paint? ...Non, merci! The true artist says to herself, 'I am old!' and she is old.... 'I am ugly!' and she becomes hideous. 'I am wicked!' See here!... Is this a face to regard with love, Monsieur?"
The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken. No Japanese mask of a witch could well have been more furrowed, puckered, scowling, or malignant than the face that had been Titania's a moment back. Breagh called out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly fascinated; and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:
"Or I can be stupid, very stupid—if that will please you!... Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls.... We had one at the Convent—your countrywoman and a great heiress. Miss Smizz—the daughter of Smizz and Co., Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."
She banished all expression save a smile of absolute fatuity, puffed out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids, permitting her eyes to twinkle through the merest slits. She giggled inanely, and said, combining the consonantal thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a hen-turkey...
"All the eggstras.... Whad does expedse battere whed you've got a Forchud to fall bag od? Besides, Ba says I bust barry iddo the Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod usually expegded of a doblebad's wife!"
She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss Smith, her expectations, and her splutter:
"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of you!... I am perhaps a little excited. There is something strange in the air.... I have a humming in my ears as though great crowds of people were talking very softly.... What is it?" she asked in bewilderment, pressing the fine points of her small fingers into her temples. "What is the matter with me to-night?..."
Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a challenge to Destiny:
"There is nothing the matter with you!... That is the glory of it! You were ill, and now you are well.... You can laugh again, and sleep again, and cook a dinner and help to eat it.... You have made capital use of your time!... For we came here on the twenty-first of August, and this is the fifth of October. We have been shut up in a garden, as you say yourself, for more than six weeks!..."