For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse had joined the Bund. The King of Saxony had signed,—Würtemburg would sign the treaty of Federation shortly. There were prospects of a definite settlement with the King of Bavaria. The ambition of the Man of Iron was shortly to be realized.... Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!
You might have seen him, upon this bland November morning that had succeeded a night of shrieking northerly gusts and driving pelts of sleety rain, walking with the Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence. The house immediately opposite had now been converted into a guard post. Sentries in the uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates. Over the principal entrance hung the black and white Prussian standard.
The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds sailing toward the northeast. The leaves that yet remained upon the elms and poplars shone in the sunshine like newly minted gold. Those that the gale had stripped lay in wet drifts upon the grass and gravel, though the three oak trees on the pleasance yet retained their suits of crisping russet brown.
To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man servant was sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the narrow terrace of steps running round three sides of the building. The swish of his birch broom punctuated the sentences of the newspaper article being read by Hatzfeldt to his Chief.
It was the continuation of the article in theBerliner Zeitungthat had roused the ire of the Warlock a little while before.
"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of Humanity, we demand that this measure be taken at once. We reprehend in the sternest terms, not only those military commanders who are in favor of procrastination. We cry in the ears of the Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count Bismarck himself, who is credited with being the main factor in this policy of delay:Mene, mene, tekel upharsin!—'Thou art weighed in the balance, and found to want!'"
Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:
"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I should be inclined to believe she had written this." He added: "I have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an excess of tenderness is something quite new to me. How shall we reassure these excitable gentlemen? Buschlein"—he referred to his Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous "Recollections"—"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."
He spat and resumed:
"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I am really averse to the bombardment, and why I won't allow firing into the town? What pernicious rubbish! They will be blaming me next for all losses during the investment. Which are not small; for in little skirmishes, and during the short time occupied by those abortive sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done had we regularly stormed the place."
He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome,débonnairecountenance invariably fell at any reference to a bombardment:
"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters from Paris, some of which I have already read, and a Figaro of yesterday's date. It has been decreed by the French Government that all wine and provisions are to be taken away from private people, as the poorer classes have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats. So your American father-in-law will have to look out for his cellar—an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from you. And your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably be made into cutlets—a pretty piece of intelligence for your next letter to Madame!"
"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried Hatzfeldt, with ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore you not to conjure up the image of my wife's indignation and despair. Every letter I receive from her begins and ends with her precious ponies."
The Minister appended:
"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is living at their estate of Petit Val, near Marly—I think you told me—being sandwiched in between the little beasts."
They were pacing the garden paths. The Chancellor had recently risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood. He continued, throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:
"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no morepâtéof pheasants, or sausages. Pray tell her, with my compliments, that both were excellently fresh and good.... Did you notice written on my table card that the Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute interview before M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve? If I have not polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up the doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and his gold spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation below here for an instant—do not send him up straightway to the torture cell." Thus the Minister had christened the small room adjoining his private apartment. He went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with his white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a string of tales about our orgies and revelings, of the enormous expense of which the Mayor is coming to complain."
"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.
"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost the town too much to keep, the chief offenders being the grand ducal and princely personages at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Of course, one knows that the Tinsel Rabble eat and drink a great deal more than they require, and waste much more than they consume. But to a Frenchman, one cannot admit as much. So I shall tell the Mayor that he must apply to the French Government at Tours for permission to raise a substantial money loan, and as M. Thiers has only just come from there, he would naturally buttonhole the old gentleman if he encountered him. Which—as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is as timid as a hare and as soft as a baby—would discompose him very horribly...." He continued: "He is dying to make peace with us, because there will soon be famine in Paris. Imagine how I caught him out when I told him yesterday: 'Monsieur, you have only visited the city for a few hours. We know better about the contents of its magazines than you do. They have ample provisions to last until the end of January....' What a look of incredulity! I had only been feeling his pulse, as it were.... His amazement told me what I most wanted to know. What a man to make a bargain about an armistice, an invalidy civilian, who cannot conceal his feelings! Who lets himself be put out of countenance and pumped!—actually pumped!"
He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate copiously.... "There!" he said, wiping his mustache vigorously with a large white cambric handkerchief. "You see what it is to have a stomach as sensitive as mine is.... That injustice done me in theBerliner Zeitungwith reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of bile, by which I was already incommoded. Thiers will be certain to remain closeted with me for two hours. He is nothing if not expansive and flowery, and redundant. I shall not be able to get on horseback before three o'clock, and we dine at six." He went on, punctuating the sentence with more coughs and hawkings: "And as our table is to be graced—tchah!—by a huge trout pasty, a love gift to the Chancellor of the—hah!—Confederation, from a Berlin restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain—ahah!—a cask of Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with his wife and—brr'r!"
He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending, resuming, as he used the big white handkerchief:
"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome.... More bile!... I spat like this half the night through.... Decidedly I am not as well as when we galloped along the highroads with the Great Headquarters Staff.... I have wondered: Do I eat too much? Does this sedentary life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and answered himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple of eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk? I don't lunch—lunch is a mockery of a meal—but in the evening I make a hearty dinner. With beer and champagne in plenty, and wash all down with half a dozen cups of tea. Then I go to bed—as you know, never before midnight. There's a doze—and I waken up with my brain as bright as daylight—all sorts of things running through it, and my mouth full of this bitter—faugh!"
"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said Hatzfeldt, slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously crumpled the soiled cambric into a ball. "Shall I send Your Excellency's servant to fetch another?"
"No, no! As it happens, I have sent Grams out. And Engelberg is busy. There is Madame Charles's factotum!" He called in French: "Hola, Jean Jacques! Approach, my brave young man!"
His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and biliously injected, had turned to where the strongly built young male servant was still sweeping the steps of the rear of the house. Cropped to the scalp, you saw the fellow attired in a well-worn morning jacket of striped linen, a blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers, yellow piped at the side seams. Summoned by an imperative word and gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood it up against the side of the conservatory, and shambled to where the Chancellor was standing, muttering with a downcast air and a furtive, sulky look:
"Ouiche, Monseigneur?...What is it Monseigneur desires?"
Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great mustache and showed the white, square teeth that a young man might have envied:
"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean Jacques would betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame Charles Tessier of her goodness to favor Monseigneur with a clean handkerchief.... Perhaps two would be better.... Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy legs to rapid motion, for tocroquer le marmotis not a favorite pastime with Monseigneur! Comprehend you?"
Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a bow of the clumsiest:
"Ouiche, Monseigneur!"
"De quel pays sont vous?" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.
Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:
"La Suisse, Monsieur!"
Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene of his abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went round the end of the conservatory toward the kitchen quarters:
"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or Swiss because they are too funky to fight!"
Said the Minister:
"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this fellow, describes him as a native of Neufchâtel. Here she comes herself, bringing my handkerchiefs. Thank you a thousand times, Madame! But why inconvenience yourself?"
Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with white, was crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets, parted in the middle, and brushed down in two old-fashioned festoons on either side of her haggard white wedge of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it was no trouble whatever.... The laundress's basket with Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.
Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff, antique material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt, and upon the sleeves and waist. It had been discovered in a wardrobe belonging to the mother of M. Charles Tessier. She had on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her black silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray curls of her respected mother-in-law. Over her narrow shoulders hung the inevitable white woolen shawl.
She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to Count Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and disappeared round the corner of the ivy-bordered path. Seen thus in the searching daylight, the elevation and forward thrust of the left shoulder that lent her gait its unpleasant peculiarity, and the curvature in the lower part of the spine were even more painfully apparent. It occurred to her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes, reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality upon herself.
She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the November sunshine. Round the corner of the green glass conservatory, well out of sight of those who walked in the garden, Jean Jacques Potier was shivering, too.
When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat again, the knees of Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him. His heart had sunk like a leaden plummet, and the sweat of terror had started on his skin.
He was afraid—horribly afraid. Not for himself, but for another. There was no knowing. The thing he feared might happen at any time.
"Throw but a stone—the giant dies!..."
He could hear now the very voice in which she had added: "See you well, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"
He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the object of turning Juliette from her purpose. He did not know whether he had succeeded. She would give him no promise. She was sphinxlike, inscrutable.... You could never feel sure that in the middle of the night there would not be a cry—and then a commotion of running feet upon the stairs, and then—the arrest, and the accusation. He had made up his mind to say, when that happened: "It was my doing. She knew nothing about it. It was I who put poison in the food of this man!"
Then he would be taken out and shot. It would be done instantly, whether the owner of the life that had been attempted died or got well. Perhaps the man would not die? He had an iron constitution and the frame of a Titan. But sometimes he looked weary and haggard and bilious. And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of P. C. Breagh would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs would shake under him, as they were shaking now.
Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:
"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she does not fear damp, that is quite plain ... see how she trails her skirts over the wet grass. Now, if she were to show her feet, should we be grateful, or the reverse?"
A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes as he noted Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he spoke. He went on:
"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands that are exquisite. Have you ever looked closely at the hands of Madame Charles? If not, I recommend them to your notice. They are well worth looking at." He added, ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose that we follow her—discreetly and at a distance. I have still a few minutes before the Mayor arrives."
He led the way. They crossed a portion of the lawn and turned into a gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over with wet and rotting leaves. The shining patent-leather boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by their contact. The Chancellor, observing this, said:
"Never mind.... You can have them cleaned! My man Niederstedt polishes boots capitally!"
Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:
"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes. But never again will they be the same after a wetting. And they are made by the only man in the world who knows how to make boots."
The Minister said brutally:
"Order another pair of the fellow!"
Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:
"He lives in Paris—Rue de Lafayette. And Your Excellency is going to have Paris bombarded!"
Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal laughter:
"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of their own heads know a great deal better than that.... According to them, I am a humanitarian—altruistic to imbecility."
"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation, know Your Excellency better than they!"
The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the impending destruction of his bootmaker's establishment, incensed Hatzfeldt to the point of an imprudent retort.
The granite face turned. The heavy regard rested upon him. With his characteristic stutter—a signal as warning to those who knew him as the rattle of thecrotalushidden in the brake, the Minister said:
"So I am not a philanthropist, or a—or an apostle of light and sweetness. I would prefer to build an Empire with the fallen towers of the modern Babylon?..."
Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the Russian Princess, his mother. The Minister went on in a lighter tone:
"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on the highest branches. They were bigger and sweeter and rosier than the others, though in stealing them I risked both my breeches and my neck. Well! To be plain, there are two apples just now that I particularly covet: the Bombardment—and the Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany from the Tuileries...." He added: "Thevia mediais not the surest road to an arrangement that shall be lasting. The most convincing arguments are uttered by the iron mouths of big guns!"
They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. The patch of green still spread upon the eastern boundary wall, where the water trickled down. The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the tiny pond cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his Infanta, but the pipe remained unsoldered because the plumber's men had gone to the War. Thus the Satyr's mouth remained dry, though the chuckle still sounded in the Satyr's throat.
Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the Minister and his courtly First Secretary stepped into the open. She started slightly, glanced round, bent her head, and limped painfully away.
Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward, misshapen figure:
"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to look over the garden wall!"
Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise. He objected:
"It would hardly be possible. The wall must be eight feet high, and how in the world could a woman, elderly and with that distressing deformity——"
The laugh that shook the great figure beside him puzzled as much as the utterance.
"She is a daughter of Eve—and it would be possible, by putting a toe in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman, to ascertain that I have had two sentries posted on the other side of this wall. Listen!..."
He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he habitually carried, and an answering rap came from the other side.
"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an unoccupied house," he added. "And ranged along the wall are bushes, behind which my two men stand well screened."
"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that quarter?" inquired Hatzfeldt.
"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the safe side, and Versailles is pretty well packed with people by whom I am rather particularly detested. But as a fact, I placed the soldiers for the purpose of catching Madame's postman. You did not perceive as we stepped out of the shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this creature's mouth?"
Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:
"Why, no, Your Excellency. I saw nothing of the kind!"
The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret laughter:
"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for seeing some things at a distance.... A pretty face behind a thick veil ... a graceful figure concealed by a shawl. Possibly the friend who communicates with Madame Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires her.... There is no accounting for tastes...."
Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:
"Who is Madame Charles's friend? Is it possible that misshapen creature has a lover?"
The Minister answered with a curious grimace:
"A lover who is apparently aFranc-tireur."
Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:
"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a black cloth uniform, and carry a black standard with a skull above a pair of crossbones. Perhaps his lady-love sat for the picture of the Death's head?"
The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:
"Possibly she did.... Though there have been moments when, under Madame's extraordinary coiffure with the black lace lappets, I have seen peeping at me—imagine what?"
"I cannot imagine.... Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.
"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue eyes...." The Minister went on: "But not only hatred.... Youth, and prettiness. Now, look here, and—for I am perfectly convinced that you believe me bewitched by our landlady—behold my rival'sbillet-doux!.."
Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter. The Minister put his hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted therefrom a little envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky scrawl.
"To My Adored Wife."
The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held the superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly proceeded to open the envelope.... Hatzfeldt, at first crimson, and writhing with repressed merriment, became graver as the Minister read aloud:
"What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that are sleepless and solitary. Credit, my little one, that thy Charles is often near. In the thought of thy husband, if not in person, he rests upon thy heart so faithful and fond."
Hatzfeldt spluttered. The reader continued:
"We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig Hussars the other day at the village of Hably.... We shot down many of the Prussian marauders and killed their horses. Only eleven escaped with life. They returned later and burned the village, committing unexampled brutalities, and murdered several of the inhabitants. It is well! We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate.
"All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war waged upon a merciless invader. We number nobles, peasants, citizens, criminals in our armed and organized ranks. Each man will kill as he knows best. The rifle, the knife, the scythe, or the cudgel, the gardener's shears, the chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are weapons lawful to be used against the enemies of France. We will dig wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by method and wreck scientifically. We will tumble them down wells, drown them in rivers, burn the huts they are sleeping in over their heads. And our sisters?—our wives? They are united with us in our solemn compact of destruction. They will embrace to strangle. They will smile and stab! They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les Prussiens, and the dogs will eat of them and die.
"These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids. These for thy two little hands. Dost thou love me? Till death and after,
"Thine and thine only,"Charles Tessier."
There was a silence. The Minister broke it with a grim sentence:
"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he is making love to his spitfire of a wife. A fine breed of young criminals should spring from such a union!"
The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment on the speech. The Minister had deftly opened the envelope without tearing the flap, which was still moist. He now refolded and slipped back the sheet into the envelope, wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from the hole in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the envelope. He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the clocks of Versailles struck the half hour, and said to Hatzfeldt, replacing the watch:
"Half-past twelve.... Do you know, I read something by Félix Pyat very like this"—he slightly waved the drying envelope—"in a copy of thePetit Journalthat was brought me the other day.... Now, my Mayor is due, and M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels.... I must return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed here."
"Here, Excellency!"
The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.
"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello.... Frankly, I cannot understand why Madame Charles herself placed this letter in the gape of the mask.... I am curious to know who will fetch it away from there.... I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and find out."
Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall. The Minister nodded.
"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see through these bricks. Really, I must ask you to stay here and oblige me. Von Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play instead of you.... Why, you are quite pale!..."
Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:
"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation. I am regularly shaved by a Frenchman, you understand!... And theseFrancs-tireursseem to be everywhere. Really, it is horrible!"
The Minister's brow became thunderous. The lines about his mouth hardened to granite. He said in his grimmest tone:
"They should be hanged whenever found! And not cut down, but left hanging, for a salutary warning to other rascals.... Do you know that theCombat—the organ edited by that blackguard Félix Pyat—wishes to get up a subscription for the purchase of a gold-mounted rifle to be given to the scoundrel who succeeds in removing the Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck. Well—Auf Wiedersehen! Ride out with me after lunch to the aqueduct of Marly, and tell me what I want to know."
And the great figure strode away, leaving the First Secretary to his unwelcome task.
"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated his graceful figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and the rich soil, rendered marshy by the overflow of the lily pool, squashily gave way beneath his once immaculate boots. "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the Foreign Officechefwith the cooking! The Chief swears by herragoûtsand her omelettes and herbeignets. They are certainly excellent.... I must avoid them for the future. A young married man with a family must be careful. I wonder, if anything unpleasant happened, whether Touti would marry again?"
The bushes were wet with rain. Little cold showers sprinkled the dandy's head and shoulders. His boots sank deeper as the wet trickled down his neck. What a degrading task for a First Diplomatic Secretary! With what shrieks of laughter his lively American Countess would read his written description of his experiences as a spy! A corn began to shoot. He sneezed. This meant influenza to a certainty. Even while he devoted Madame Charles, her bloodthirsty spouse, and all her countrymen to the hottest corner of Tophet, he kept a bright lookout. And in another five minutes or so he saw the person for whom he lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path that wound through the shrubbery.
It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes and blunders kept the Prussian Chancery attendants in a continual eruption of abusive German epithets, and whosepatois, proclaimed to be Swiss, was so extremely puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon an exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only assign the youth to a canton of his own. He thrust his hand into the Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the letter, twisted a wry mug as he regarded it, and said, with an admirable English accent:
"Oh, damn!..."
Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen regions, he thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped cotton jacket and scampered back to the house.
You will remember that when Juliette had consented to marry the unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear Colonel's very sake, adorned the faceless one with features, a complexion, shoulders, muscles, and so on. She had even boasted to Monica's brother of the swordsmanship of the worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer, whose most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of thrushes and sparrows, which he would bring home to the Rue de Provence in triumph, to be converted by his adoring mother into savory pies.
Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps to relieve the strain of an otherwise unbearable situation—possibly with the desire of inflicting on her unfortunate adorer the torturing pangs of jealousy, or possibly to create and maintain in herself a fictitious interest in the supposititious husband, she had begun anew to expatiate upon his gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not leave off. Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a blunt nose, and a square chin with a dent in it. He was pale, with melancholy black eyes and a high brow. His jetty mustache was waxed, his imperial finished in a point of the most elegant.... He quoted poetry in a deep voice, and was capable of torrential outbursts of passion. He was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of Balzac's beautiful young man.
Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had become restive, to the point, one day, of being clumsily sarcastic on the immunity of widows' only sons from the obligation of military service, and so on.
That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious communication to the effect that her lord had secretly quitted Belgium, penetrated in disguise into France, passed through the Prussian lines in a series of hairbreadth escapes, and joined a corps ofFrancs-tireurs. Since when, letters containing tirades inspired by the most flaming patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure, and passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at intervals by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask. Of late, since she had developed nervousness about fetching the letters herself, Jean Jacques had sulkily performed the office. And when she did not, with due precautions, declaim these effusions for the benefit of her victim and fellow conspirator, his was the task—inconceivably repulsive to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading them aloud to Madame Charles. Hence the expletive which had betrayed his British nationality to Count Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in his squelching patent leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa trees.
From Tours, chief town of the Department of the Indre et Loire, 120 miles southwest of Paris as the crow flies, where Cremieux, Minister of Justice, and rather too doddery to be of efficiency at this crisis, had established the Administrative of the Provisional Government of the new French Republic;—whither M. Leon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, Member of the Board of National Defense, had recently betaken himself, escaping from the besieged capital to Montdidier as a passenger in the car of a balloon—whither the veteran Garibaldi had now arrived to offer his services in the cause of Liberty—from Tours had come the famous diplomat and man of letters, contemptuously dubbed "Professor" by Count Bismarck, with the object of carrying out the peace negotiations in whose conduct the tragic patriarch Favre had broken down.
You saw the famous Minister and author of theHistoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, as a little, stocky, black-clad old gentleman with a square gray head, round, clean-shaven face, and bright, round eyes, looking through gold-rimmed spectacles.... Above all, a patriot, heart and soul devoted to France, the position of this famous French statesman of seventy-five, newly returned, empty of all but fair words and vain courtesies, from a pilgrimage to the Courts of various neutral Powers, was horrible and painful beyond words.
Sad, distracted, anxious little gentleman, charged with the mission of obtaining those needed terms of peace, or at least an armistice from the conqueror upon the threshold, can you see him, in the shadow of the magnificent Temple erected by the Sun King, toiling and moiling with his secretary, the younger M. Remusat, in preparation for those anguish-fraught interviews with the German Chancellor.
The tables of his sitting-room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs were piled with books and papers—papers covered with abstruse calculations dealing with the most urgent need—the provisioning of Paris—papers dealing with the question of the Elections—papers dealing with the General Census—papers of every imaginable kind. And with these, from dawn till midnight, the little, grief-worn man wrestled while the Tinsel Rabble and their staffs of German officers reveled in the dining-saloons, and trampled and shouted and clanked and jingled up and down the corridors, and in and out of the bedrooms; and the roar of the guns from the forts of the beleaguered city shook the windows from time to time.
Now and then he would lie back exhausted in his chair, or lie down and sleep, if sleep ever visited him. He took his frugal meals in a private cabinet opening out of the great dining-hall of the restaurant. Since the thirtieth of October he had been engaged in this wise, save when, having been first compelled to apply to Count Bismarck for a pass and a military safe-conduct, he would meet and confer with Favre, or one of his other colleagues, at some chosen spot without the walls of the beleaguered capital.
Only the previous day he had trundled down in a little, shaky, hired brougham to the half-ruined and wholly deserted suburb of Sèvres, preceded by an officer of Uhlans with a White Flag on a pole.
Day after day the little brougham had drawn up before the modest house in the Rue de Provence, and the little gentleman, whose head seemed to whiten perceptibly, had stepped out with his portfolio under his arm, as now. Day after day the Chancery footmen would open the door to him, and Madame Charles Tessier, hovering in the background, would drop the representative of suffering France her lowest curtsey, and sometimes gain a brief word with his unfailing bow and smile. To-day, as Major von Keudell appeared in the doorway of the drawing-room—the Chancellor being closeted in his private interviewing-room upstairs with the Republican Mayor of Versailles—the little gentleman said simply, offering his hand to the eccentric-looking person in the cap with lappets and the white shawl:
"The sympathy that is expressed in looks and by silence can be very eloquent and very touching. From my heart I thank you for yours, Madame!"
And as she had burst out sobbing and kissed the hand, he had drawn it away with a murmured protest, and had passed on into the drawing-room where Von Keudell was to hold him in conversation until the Mayor had been polished off.
But M. Thiers had endured the ordeal with a courteous kind of resignation, only looking at his watch from time to time, or glancing at the clock over which presided the horned, bat-winged, cloven-hoofed and tailed figure that tickled the fancy of his oppressor so much.
"His Excellency expected me," he said. "There has been no mistake about the time of the appointment—named by himself at our previous interview. The greatness of the interests concerned are apprehensible by His Excellency!"
The mild sarcasm rebounded pointless from Von Keudell's bluff rejoinder:
"No, no mistake at all. His Excellency has merely shifted the hour. From half-past twelve to a quarter to one—His Excellency found it more convenient."
"What boors are these Germans!" thought the angered diplomat, writhing, as some medieval victim, condemned to undergo torture by rack and fire, might have writhed at the delay of the hideous ordeal.
And then the door opened. The Chief Torturer looked in with the salutation:
"A pleasant day! I am quite at your service now, if you will come up to me.... You know the way, I think?..."
And the great figure vanished, and the heavy footsteps thundered up the drugget-covered stairs.
Did the sorrowful visitor know the way to the torture-chamber? Surely malice must have prompted the query addressed to the unfortunate plenipotentiary of France.
The room he had so loathed had one window looking out on the Rue de Provence, and another at the south side of the house, where stood the pine-tree and the turtle-backed green glass conservatory with the wrought-iron bridge above it. It had a figured gray carpet, a green hearthrug with red edges, dark green stuff curtains, and various oil-paintings and steel engravings hung upon the walls, which were painted coffee-tinted cream. It was furnished with a writing-table, on which were a terrestrial globe, a celestial one, and a tellurion, a large gray marble-topped chiffonier, a sofa covered with chintz, pattern red-and-gray birds-of-paradise on a background with palm-leaves; two cane chairs and a round center-table, upon which lay a platter of wood containing the colored glass marbles with which one plays the game of solitaire.
It was a game of solitaire which was played in that stiff, primly-furnished apartment, in one corner of which stood a mahogany bedstead of Empire pattern, with an obsolete drapery of green-figured brocade. Such a game as may be played by a grim, greedy, gray-mustached Grimalkin with a plump, bright-eyed, feebly-palpitating mouse.
M. Thiers had been gravely imperiled by the shell-fire of the French guns in the act of returning from Sèvres on the previous day, a mischance which had increased the palpitations which were caused by his heart disease, and wounded his feelings cruelly. Commented the Chancellor, to whom he unwisely related the episode:
"Fortunately the cab-horse was too ill-fed to bolt, but the window was broken, and you were mud-splashed all over.... Not exactly the first time that your countrymen have treated you in that way!..."
And this first scratch of the claw that never failed to draw blood was followed by the query whether M. Thiers were provided with full powers for carrying on the negotiations?
The Minister added, enjoying his victim's start and look of horrified astonishment:
"My people in Paris tell me that there has been practically a Revolution, and that a new Government is coming into power. On the Place before the Hôtel de Ville there were yesterday 15,000 persons assembled, most of them National Guards from the Faubourgs, disarmed and crying: 'Vive la Commune! ... Point d'Armistice!'"
He went on, unheeding the writhing of the sufferer, whose dignity had been so cruelly wounded:
"It appears that the Mayors of Paris had been summoned by Arago, and were in one room conferring, while in the other was the Government. Mobiles guarded the doors, but were thrust back by the insurgents. General Trochu came out and confronted them. He could only mouth and gesticulate in a sort of dumb Crambo. Cries of 'A bas Trochu!' drowned his voice. There was a rush.... One does not know how, but Trochu finally escaped out of their clutches—got out by a back door and cut his lucky to the Louvre.... Here is one of the slips of paper that were thrown from the windows of the Hôtel.... They have 'Commune décretée. Dorian Président!' upon them. There was a scene of confusion peculiar to your nation, in the midst of which M. Félix Pyat and other virtuous citizens proclaimed the Commune, and constituted themselves into a Government embracing Blanqui, Ledru-Rollin, Délescluze, Louis Blanc, and Flourens.... Flourens got upon a table—made himself heard, it seems, finally calling upon the Members of the Government of National Defense to resign. M. Jules Favre refused ... was arrested with the old Government—the new Government reigned until two o'clock in the morning, when some battalions of Mobiles—the 106th and 90th, under Picard—closed in upon the Hôtel and ejected them. Trochu was there with his staff.... Since, a general sort of agreement appears to have been arrived at. A decree signed by Favre was placarded yesterday, announcing that on Thursday next a vote is to be taken whether there is to be a Commune or not.... What I relate happened the day before yesterday. Now, if Your Excellency saw M. Jules Favre at Sèvres yesterday afternoon, he must have told you of the turn things were taking. Oblige me with a plain answer to a plain question.... Did he tell you, or did he not?"
The humiliated gentleman bowed his head assentingly. The hot sweat of a mortal agony stood upon his broad forehead, and flushed and working features. His glasses were dimmed with the reek of his torment and his shame. The Enemy knew all. There was no concealing anything from one so well served by spies and informers. Probably the cruel interview with his fellow-Minister had been listened to, from its beginning to its end.
Thiers and Favre had sat on two iron chairs at a gayly painted little iron table, before one of the wreckedcafésthat boasted the sign ofLa Belle Bouquetière. No one had been near except a haggard, absinthe-sodden wretch, who lay in a drunken stupor upon the pavement, close under the broken window of the deserted restaurant. Perhaps that drunken man had been his spy.... What was he saying in the harsh, bullying tones that grated so?...
"The mob who rode roughshod over General Trochu, and his Council of lawyers and orators, appear to be actuated by the desire of fighting things out with us. They burn for a chance, it appears, to pit their undisciplined courage against the Army of United Germany. They are hardly to be blamed for accepting literally the theatrical bombast with which they have been fed by Favre!"
He laughed, and said, with a galling imitation of the rhetorical manner of the Democratic barrister of Lyons:
"'Not a stone of our fortresses'—do you remember? 'Not an inch of our territory!'—have you forgotten?... When it was in the power of the person to whom he boasted to have said to him:Every inch. Every stone!..."
He rose up, towering over the unhappy personage who sat opposite to him, in a little wicker easy-chair that would have suited a child. His greedy vitality physically sucked energy from his victim. The stare of his great eyes oppressed, the roughness of his speech had a wounding brutality.
"Which Party governs France? The Blue Republicans or the Reds, answer me? Can one treat with a State that has no responsible heads?"
"Monsieur le Comte!" screamed the personage thus cruelly prodded. "Do you not know that you are insulting me?"
He had grown deadly pale, and now flushed red, making a passionate gesture as though to strike himself on the forehead, as the other asked him with bitter irony:
"Is the truth so offensive to you as all that?... If you did not wish to hear it, you have come to the wrong shop. The day for compliments and flatteries has passed with the tinsel Empire of your Napoleon, unless you compel us to bring him back and set him up again at the Tuileries. Believe me, he has contemplated this eventuality!—has his carpet-bags ready packed, and his eagle in a traveling-cage.... And certainly we could discuss the military questions at issue better with him than with you civilian gentlemen, who do not understand the language of War."
It was not possible to get a word in edgeways.... The rasping voice tore the nerve-fibers as with a saw-edge, the towering figure overwhelmed, the powerful stare fascinated and terrified as the pitiless gaze of the snake when fixed upon a frog or a bird.
And Bismarck went on, deliberately lashing himself into a passion:
"Are you and your colleagues aware that I suffer in my reputation for these procrastinations? It is said at home in Germany that I am over-lenient toward the French, our treacherous enemies ... that I delay to reap for United Germany the glory and profit for which she has paid so terrible a price in blood. Yourself with MM. Ducrot and Favre have considered my terms for an armistice inadmissible.... In return I tell you you have forfeited the right to criticize any terms that I may propose.... You would hold the elections—even in those provinces of France which we hold as conquerors! You would reprovision Paris and her fortresses! We should be hellish unpractical if we listened to you!... What the big devil!... Are we to permit the levies, and the recruiting by which the French Republic may hurl against us a new army to shoot down?Himmelkreuzbombenelement!... Do you take us for sheep's heads?"
The unhappy Minister protested in a faint voice:
"Monsieur le Comte, I do not even comprehend the meaning of the term!"
"Ah, by God!" thundered the terrible voice, "you are ignorant indeed of German words and German meanings, and the word that you understand least of all when applied to yourselves is WAR! Silk gloves are not our wear in War, and therefore the iron gloves with which we have handled you have pinched your soft flesh and made you squeal. We might complain of yourFrancs-tireurs, who hide in woods and houses, and shoot our soldiers unawares; and of the inhumanity of your mitrailleuses which cut red lanes through whole regiments. But no! You are the sufferers—you are to be pitied—even for the injuries you wreak upon yourselves...."
He struck with his clenched fist the top of the chiffonier near which he stood, and the dull shock of the contact of that sledge-hammer of muscle and bone with the solid marble, made the pictures shake upon the wall, the windows rattle in their frames, and the bewildered listener leap as if he had been shot.
"I rode over to St. Cloud yesterday," he went on, "to look at the palace you have set on fire with your shells from Mont Valérien. It is burning still, as I don't doubt you know. A well-dressed French gentleman stood looking at the smoldering ashes of the conflagration. Near him was a French workman in a dirty blue blouse—'C'est l'œuvre de Bismarck!' said the gentleman to the plebeian, little dreaming who was near.... But the cad in the blouse only said to him: 'Why, our —— gunners did that themselves!' That workman had more sense in his pumpkin than the whole lot of you!"
M. Thiers revived under the fresh insult sufficiently to plant a sting:
"It is said, Monsieur, and on excellent authority, that the Imperial Palace was sacked by German troops before it was set on fire."
The Chancellor lowered his heavy brows and demanded almost menacingly:
"Do you assert that His Majesty the King or the Crown Prince of Prussia were parties to a crime of this kind?"
"No, Monsieur, not for an instant!"
The Chancellor said with a short laugh that had no mirth in it:
"That is fortunate, otherwise I should have been compelled to break off, and finally, our negotiations with regard to this question of an Armistice, and deal only with the question of the territory to be added—in addition to the fortresses on the right bank of the Rhine—and those six thousand millions of francs that we shall certainly take from you!"
The thrust caused M. Thiers to leap to his feet, galvanized into a feverish energy. He screamed, raising his clenched hands and sweeping them downward and outward:
"It cannot be, Monsieur!—it is outrage—robbery—ruin! Europe will intervene if you persist in such a demand!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" The great jovial giant's laugh set the crystal drops upon the mantelshelf-vases and the wall-mirror girandoles tinkling, and reached the hearing of Hatzfeldt and von Keudell in the drawing-room, and the decipherers in the Bureau below. It vibrated through the joists and planks and spaces above the plastered ceiling, and made Madame Charles start where she lay upon the floor of her bedroom listening, with her ear pressed to the uncarpeted boards.
"My good sir, you are making game of me.... You have visited the Courts of the Powers—we know to what profit.... You have solicited intervention—to be told what both of us knew very well before! ... The British Lion may lash and roar, but will not do more, that is certain. England has not sufficiently recovered from the war of the Crimea—from the further drain of men and gold caused by the Indian Mutiny.... Austria, in spite of creeds and bias—with her German-speaking population and her Germanized institutions—may be regarded as a powerful German State. Italy lies under the heel of Austria. If the Russian Bear elect to hug, the hugging will be done upon our side. For it is inconceivable that Germany should ever be at war with Russia. Our interests are and have always been one...." He laughed again, and said, laughing:
"And, knowing this, you threaten me with the intervention of European Powers.... You will hear nothing with respect to forfeiture of territory!... You refuse to contemplate the question of the Gold Indemnity!... Wait!" he said—"wait until the bombardment is a month old and the bread-basket is empty.... Then we shall hear you sing to a different tune!"
"Monsieur le Comte!..."
The old man tottered to his feet. He was ashen in hue, and trembling. His blue lips hung breathlessly apart, his eyes had a lack-luster stare behind their gold-rimmed glasses; he pressed a hand over his left breast as though to repress a pang of pain.
"M. le Comte ... I have suffered too much.... I find myself unable to continue our interview.... With your permission ... to-morrow?..." He bowed and took his hat and cane, and repeated weakly: "To-morrow?"
"With pleasure!" said the Man of Iron, escorting him to the door.
And the old, humiliated, fallen King-maker, the great literary genius, the polished orator—tottered away out of the presence of the conqueror.
He was to return upon the morrow, and for many days thenceafter, to be played with and tortured, to be tantalized and mocked.
He was to return flushed with futile hope, only to be crushed and retire discomfited. He was to furnish an inexhaustible source of amusement for the delectation of his implacable enemy.
He was to return after a prolonged absence within the walls of the beleaguered capital, he and others, faint with famine, broken by anxiety, shattered by suspense and sleeplessness, forced by sheer hunger to sit and partake at the groaning board of their merciless foe, compelled by his arrogance to listen to his jestings, moistening the food they placed between their livid lips, with the stinging salt of tears.
The center of a small but lively group, composed of admirers and listeners, Prussian officers known in Berlin, their Bavarian and Hessian friends and acquaintances, American and English Press Correspondents, and a traveling Oriental or two—you might have observed Madame de Straz—a full-blown Comtesse now, in virtue of the patent of nobility asserted by her husband—in the restaurant of the Hôtel des Réservoirs—not always accompanied by her Assyrian-featured lord.
Adelaide had not grown younger since the adventure of the Silk Scarf. Her bold and striking beauty had suffered gravely, though her figure, set off by its fashionable and well-chosen dress, was as supple and graceful as of yore. She looked like some gorgeous fruit that the wasps had ravaged, and to conceal this she made up heavily and wore thicker veils. What she now lacked in loveliness she endeavored to make up inespièglerieand easy-going good-fellowship. Not a few officers responded with enthusiasm to her pressing invitations to breakfast or lunch at the little country villa she and M. de Straz had rented, at Maisons Lafitte beyond St. Germain.
One need hardly say that there was play on these occasions, besides excellently prepared dishes and a liberal flow of the champagne, besides the cognac and liqueurs of which Madame drank a good deal.
To quiet her nerves, raveled by the unhappy situation of her beloved country, she declared, for it suited her to be a Frenchwoman now.
She would have dearly liked to inveigle a Duke, Grand or Hereditary, or even a Prince Regnant, to her roof-tree and her baccarat-board, but these personages, bestarred and beribboned, furred, jack-booted, buck-skinned and long-spurred, were as shy as the hares and partridges in the forest, that were incessantly cracked at by hungry pot-hunters. Wherefore the sumptuous Adelaide must perforce be contented with Counts and Barons, whose purses were less lengthy than their pedigrees, as a rule.
"A solitary nest and too remote, it may be.... But for a bride and bridegroom, solitude and remoteness have their advantages!" had proclaimed M. de Straz, with a shrug of infinite meaning, and suggestive glances of his black Oriental eyes. Certainly the guests of Madame and Monsieur, even when conveyed to the destination in hired broughams and victorias, were wont to find the road, running through abandoned villages and by deserted châteaux, unexpectedly barricaded with felled timber and scarred with unfinished trenches, more than a trifle long.
The nest of these love-birds, half a mile from the sacked railway station and the broken bridge of Maisons Lafitte, was enclosed in private grounds. The villa Laon—how or from whom acquired, nobody ever thought of questioning—was a cottage with Swiss gables and East Indian verandas standing in gardens adorned with glass arcades and Italian pergolas, their vines and roses stripped and shuddering in the bitter wintry winds. There were also Chinese bridges crossing pieces of ornamental water, aviaries of finches and canaries, and wired enclosures once well stocked with silver pheasants, now, thanks to the nocturnal ravages of mysterious marauders, depopulated in a manner painful to behold.
"You pretend," said Valverden teasingly to Adelaide, "that the neighbors creep out at night and annex the pheasants, or that our cavalry pickets take them for the mess-pot, or that they are stolen byFrancs-tireurs.Francs-tireursthere are in plenty in the neighborhood—every hour some honest German soldier gets his death at the hands of one of these scoundrels!—but as far as concerns the vanished inmates of the pens and cages, I believe you and M. de Straz have eaten them yourselves."
He stretched his long spurred legs out over the brocade of an Empire sofa gracing Madame's boudoir, and leaning back his handsome head, looked up at her teasingly.
"With my assistance, for thatsalmiswe had for breakfast was of home production I am certain. Come, own that I have guessed as well as Mariette can cook at a pinch."
Adelaide frowned and bit her lip. But she let her gaze dwell lingeringly on the upturned face of the handsome Guardsman, and said, seeming to search for her own sulky, splendid image in the blue eyes with which Adonis made play:
"If you were less like Max I believe I should detest you!..." She added, after an instant: "And if you resembled him more than you do, you would find no welcome here."
"Beyondsalmisof pet pheasants, and stewed carp out of your landlord's fish-ponds." His red lips rolled back in a grin that showed the strong white teeth, the fuzzy ends of his fair mustache sparkled as though the hair had been sprinkled with gold-dust. "Who is your landlord? I am dying to know. Do you rent the place of the gardener, or that pompous-looking butler who has not got the key of the cellars, but nevertheless can produce champagne of Comet brand and excellent Roussillon. Or is it a speculative partnership? Some of us have dropped a good deal of money here in play lately.... They are beginning to grumble noisily—particularly that little black-hairedaide-de-campof the Duke of Coburg, and von Kissling of the squadron of Blue Dragoons quartered here at Maisons Lafitte.... What's in the wind I don't pretend to know, but they might get you turned out of here—they might even obtain an order from Headquarters for the return of their lost cash!..."
"Bernhard!" Her ringed white hands tenderly caressed his forehead. "You will protect me from them!—you will stand my friend! Oh! how horrible it is to want money—always money!"
Valverden said, neatly biting off the end of a cigar and spitting the nipped-off end through the open glass-doors leading out upon the veranda:
"Has not M. de Straz got any money? And did not my Cousin Max give you enough?... You used to seem uncommonly flush of the ready when one saw you queening it among the gaycocottesof Berlin."
His tone cut like a whip. But Adelaide was growing used to take insults with outward meekness. She swallowed her wrath and even tried to smile.
It was horribly true that she had need of money. Even before she had fallen into her present state of servitude, she had known that a day was coming when she would be penniless.
Like all other women of her sensuous tastes and clamorous predilections, Adelaide devoured money as a pussycat crunches up small birds. Her dead lover had spent upon her lavishly, had provided that an income should be paid her out of his private estate. But it was not sufficient for a woman so extravagant, and Adelaide had supplemented it in various ways. Firstly, by obtaining information for the Prussian Secret Intelligence Bureau. Secondly, by tapping the bank-balances of admirers of the wealthier order. Thirdly, by signing Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes for cash at ruinous rates of interest. When she had conceived the idea of obtaining a reconciliation with Henri de Bayard, the prospect of incarceration in a debtor's prison had loomed very near.
The cunning fable of her riches that had been devised to tempt him to his ruin, had failed through the very whiteness of the man's integrity. Ah, Adelaide! The way to have triumphed over the Colonel would have been to have crept in tatters as a beggar to his door.
But she had never understood the man. Let us hope that generous soul of his was spared knowledge of the degradation of the woman he had worshiped, as Valverden went on, barely deigning to hide his contempt of her, or to modify even slightly the insolence of his tone:
"You have asked me to protect you. I have no objection to doing so. My sympathy is not at all with the losers who squeal. Even when I was as poor as a church-mouse I had the gift of being plucked without wincing. Besides, I won money that night when Von Kissling dropped such a lot.... And of course my testimony would be worth—something...."
His tone of bargaining was unmistakable. Adelaide flushed a dusky-red, through which the fading streaks of Straz's love-gift showed plainly, and her dark eyes gleamed covetously as she bent over the young man. She whispered with her hot lips almost touching the diagonal white band of forehead above his soldierly sunburn:
"What, Bernhard? Tell me what it would be worth to you...."
His long blue eyes laughed up into hers, lazily. He said, feeling for the silver case in which he carried his fusees:
"Shall we say ... a little information regarding the whereabouts of Mademoiselle Titania.... M. de Straz has piqued my curiosity, you will observe."
"So!..."
She reared above him like a furious Hamadryad, whispering thickly, for rage dried up her tongue:
"So it is of my daughter you and Nicolas have been talking apart together, both here and at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Are you both mad? For a pale, plain, dull school-girl ... a peaky, undeveloped, mincing doll!"
He raised himself to a sitting posture, and answered her coarsely:
"Women like you cannot realize what is or is not pleasing to men of my standard. The Prince Imperial must have seen a good many pretty women, young as he is, yet he found your daughter charming, I am told.... M. de Straz, who is a judge, admires her excessively.... If my curiosity is tickled, the fault is your own, for it was you and not M. Straz who first engaged my interest in that quarter.... Did I not speak to Count Moltke at your request of Mademoiselle? Well, he did—though at first he scouted the notion—sound Count Bismarck on the subject, when he called to congratulate him on his First Class of the Iron Cross, and be complimented on his own OrderPour Le Mérite."
He folded his arms on his broad chest and dropped the words out lingeringly, relishingly, his blue eyes gloating over the changes in her tortured face:
"And the Chancellor answered him: 'Do not you trouble yourself! All is well with the pretty young daughter of de Bayard, by that disreputable old woman who played the mistress of Count Max in '67.'"
She screamed, and struck with her clenched hand at the fair, flushed, grinning face as though she would willingly have battered out its beauty. He caught her wrist with a fencer's quickness, and prisoned the other in the twinkling of an eye. He went on, holding her immovable, leisurely enjoying the changes upon her tortured face:
"As a good German I do not interfere with my superiors. His Excellency knows where the girl is, and does not at present choose to tell. But you, Werte Frau, have the right to question His Excellency, whose answer was repeated to me by my Chief, Count Moltke. Do not forget, however, that you lay claim to the disrepute as well as the daughter when you present yourself at the Foreign Office ... in the Rue de Provence...."
She panted breathlessly:
"I shall not go! No one shall compel me!"
"Oh, in that case," said Valverden, rising and releasing her, "I can only leave you to the arguments of M. de Straz. He is coming now—I can hear his voice in the garden.Auf Wiedersehen!" He said over his shoulder, as he lounged out of the cottage: "In the affair of Von Kissling, do not count on my assistance. It is only given on condition you fall in with our views."
So he and Straz were in league.... Rage stung her to the mad imprudence of rebellion—the proud sultana whom a thousand freakish cruelties on the part of her swarthy master had taught to be a trembling slave.
The Roumanian, we know, was nothing if not subtle. When Adelaide flatly refused to call at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence in the character of a bereaved and yearning mother, he smiled on her, almost tenderly. He kissed the wrists Valverden's grip had bruised.
"Queen Rose of my Garden of Delights," he said, "why did you let the girl go in the beginning? You recognized her value even when you did not know that she has money in her own right."
Money.... A new light began to break upon Adelaide. The fear of a sudden and violent death no longer stiffened her muscles. She moistened her lips, pale under their rose-tinged salve, and lifted her eyebrows inquiringly.
"Money, soul of my soul," said Straz, who had almost reverted to the original gushing and poetic Nicolas of Adelaide's remembrance, the lover whom in pre-Sigmaringen days she had cajoled and despised and betrayed. "Not a large fortune certainly, but between her grandmother's estate and her father's savings she has a sum of 80,000 francs invested in the Belgian cloth manufactory and dyeing works of M. Charles Tessier. Not a fortune, but not a sum to be at all despised." He added: "I have obtained this information from a person—formerly a clerk in the employment of the Versailles firm of solicitors who enjoyed the confidence of M. le Colonel and his sainted mother." The quirk of his lips and the roll of his eyes as he made this reference, so unsavory in the ears of Adelaide, cannot be described. "From this retentive person—I refer to the ex-clerk—I have purchased the intelligence I now divide with her who has the right to share the secrets of my heart."
Adelaide had previously seated herself, at a motion of his finger. She looked up now as he thrust a hand between his vest and shirt-bosom. Their glances met. He said to her with a snap of his thick white fingers:
"No! Put that out of your head,ma cocotte! Not a sou of de Bayard's will ever come his widow's way."
This uncanny faculty of the Roumanian for reading her unspoken thoughts was one of the secrets of his power over Adelaide. She shuddered now, encountering his look.
"Don't you know," he was demanding, "that with her unique beauty Mademoiselle would be a fortune in our pockets even were she penniless? What! you doubt the justice of my taste—which placed on you the seal of approval when your own charms were at their perihelion. You who have paid the price for those supreme moments when celestial flames enveloped you—when you knew yourself nearest to the bosom of the Sun."
Were all the men in league with this man to taunt and mock and torture her? A fierce surge of blood rushed to her brain. She heard his thick chuckle as she loosened, with shaking hands, the lace about her throat.
"Why do you not kill me outright?" she cried to him, as the tide rushed back to her heart, and left her livid. "Are you not yet weary of playing this hideous farce of marriage? Why murder me by inches?... Will you never set me free?..."
He said, combing his clubbed beard with his thick yellow-white finger-tips:
"When you have helped to get back Mademoiselle, I will think about providing you an honorable retirement. Come! Be pliant.... You have my word that you shall be free. But without funds," he shrugged, "who can do anything? And Mademoiselle has these expectations ... and beyond these I have certain definite arrangements with—a certain personage—who is—content to pay handsomely for an introduction to her."
She cast caution to the four winds and shrieked at him furiously:
"'De Bayard's daughter by that disreputable old woman!...' Ah, for that he shall indeed pay handsomely!"
For though the sentence quoted by Valverden bore the unmistakable stamp of the Iron Chancellor's mintage, the tone in which the words had been repeated, the icy glance of contempt that had accompanied them, rankled in the flesh of the unhappy woman, like barbed thorns.
The venom wrought in her still, even to hardihood and a courage bordering on effrontery, when a few days later her hired carriage drew up before the sentried gate of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence, early in the forenoon of a December day.