One of the black-garbed Chancery attendants opened the yellow-painted hall-door. Madame tendered him a card, and said in her most musical tones, plying the archery of her fine eyes:
"Madame de Straz, formerly de Bayard. By appointment to see His Excellency the Chancellor."
Von Keudell looked out of the drawing-room and signaled. The Chancery attendant caught his eye. Madame, borne upon a gale of costly perfume, swept her velvets and Russian sables over the Foreign Office threshold, and amidst the tinkling of lockets, and charms, and bracelets innumerable, was ushered into the drawing-room.
As the door shut, and the Chancery attendant resumed his bench and his German newspaper, Jean Jacques Potier, who had been polishing the hall parquet with a flannel clout on one foot and a brush strapped on the other, resumed his labors with a very red face. Madame Charles Tessier, who had been watering the ferns and pot-plants on the console-tables, wrapped in the woolen shawl that seemed parcel of her individuality, might have struck the young man, when he furtively glanced at her, as being whiter than her shawl.
But the deadly whiteness passed, and the rigor of terror could add little stiffness to the gait that was a compound of a limp and a shuffle, as the Twopenny Roué's bugbear climbed the back-stairs to her second-floor room.
Madame Potier slept in the next. One could hear her making beds on the first-floor beneath one. Judging by the sounds, she was sweeping the Chancellor's sleeping-room.Knock-knock!went her busy broom every instant, against the furniture or the wainscot.Flip-flap!That was the duster, being shaken out of the window. When the Minister was unwell, and kept his room, Madame did not sweep, but merely dusted and made the bed. And he lay on the sofa, pulled near the fire and lengthened with a settee, or worked with his back to the window, at a table in the middle of the room. There were two great black leather dispatch-boxes on the table, and a great many maps of France, covered with marginal annotations; and the brass-handled mahogany bureau near the washstand-alcove was piled high with boxes of long, strong Bremen cigars. And by the bed was the night-table, with the framed photographs of his daughter and Countess Bismarck, his traveling candlestick, a supply of hard wax candles in a box, matches; a volume of Treitschke's "Heidelberg Lectures," with several little good books, in cloth bindings, "Daily Readings for Members of the Society of Moravian Brethren," and "Pearls from the Deep of Scripture," as well as a bottle of patent medicine and a box of pills, both of which nostrums were renewed constantly, and neither of which seemed to do him any good.
For he coughed and hawked and spat bile continually. Rarely was he silent before two o 'clock in the morning, and then it might be that one ceased to hear him, because one had succeeded in wooing sleep for oneself. Something ailed him. Those who knew him best gave no name to his ailment. Others whispered of catarrh of the stomach. Yet others were oracular upon the subject of dyspepsia of the acute kind.
Whatever the indisposition, it was fostered by the indiscriminate generosity of his admirers, who continually forwarded from all parts of the German Fatherland huge consignments of delicacies solid and fluid for the delectation of their Chancellor.
Choice wines, rare cigars and fine tobacco, liqueurs and old corn-brandies, cold punch in barrels, beer of Berlin and Leipzig, and the brunette drink beloved of Bavarians. Smoked Pomeranian goose-breasts, cakes, sausages of every variety, fresh salmon and sturgeon, pickled tunny, herrings and caviar, game of all kinds, smoked hams of bear, deer, mutton, and pig. Magdeburg sauerkraut and Leipzig pastry, preserves and fruit, fresh and candied, gorged the capacious storerooms and cellars of the Tessier mansion, which would have been found inadequate to accommodate all these mountains of good things, had not each Privy Councilor, Secretary and decipherer of the Chancellor's perambulating Foreign Office possessed a capacity for gorging only inferior to the Chief's.
In truth, this great Minister, so pitiless in his mockery of the idiosyncrasies and weaknesses of others, habitually overate himself; showing as little mercy toward his stomach as the staff of the Berlin Chancellery displayed toward the gorged and replete leather dispatch-bags that came to him by every post. He was horribly greedy, and drank a great deal, and his stomach-aches, like himself, were on the colossal scale. More than once Madame Charles had ministered to their assuagement with infusions of carbonate of soda and peppermint.
"One should check the appetite when one suffers thus from overindulgence," she had once said to him, stirring her dreadful infusion with an ivory measuring-spoon.
"The French climate does not suit me...." he had answered her. "In Germany I can eat a great deal more than I do here. Not that I eat much really, because my dinner is my only meal."
"But, just Heaven! Monseigneur! what a meal!" she had screamed at him in horror. And the room had resounded to his giant's Ha, ha, ha!
"Without a head and stomach of iron," he told her, "such as we Bismarcks inherit from our ancestors, and Göttingen has helped to render more tough, it would have been impossible in my young days to get on in the Diplomatic Service. We drank the weaker men under the table, then lifted them up, propped them between chairs, and made them sign their names to all sorts of concessions which they would not have dreamed of making otherwise.... To this day I can toss down the strongest wines of the Palatinate like water with my dinner. Champagne I need, and the bigger glasses I get it in the more it agrees with me.... Port, such as the English sip with dessert, I prefer as a breakfast-wine. Corn-brandy, such as our Old Nordhausen, is indispensable for the oiling of my machinery; and I derive benefit from rum, taken after the Russian fashion, with my eight or nine cups of after-dinner tea."
He added, sipping Madame Charles's fiercely-smelling nostrum:
"Not that anything I have drunk or eaten mars my capacity for cool reflection and close argument.... When I and one or two others are laid by, men will only peck and sip. There will only be chatter about eating and drinking....Grosser Gott!What things I used to do in that line when I was young!"
And he tossed off the contents of the tumbler, and mouthed at it, and set it down upon the little tray she held and dismissed her with a nod of thanks.
But Madame Charles carried away with her an idea of him as he had been in those old days, huge, loud, voracious, powerful, tempestuously jovial or ironically grim. She crowned the domed head with thick waving locks of brown hair, lightened the shaggy brows, and gave the blue eyes back their youthful fire; smoothed the deep lines from the florid face, restored his long heavy limbs their shapeliness, and reduced the girth of his waist. And it was impossible to despise the finished picture, because the man was so much a man.
Day by day, while the War went on, and Paris lay raging and spitting fire within her impregnable, impassable girdle of human flesh and steel and iron—to this house where he sat solid and square at his table in his bedroom-study, reading over documents vomited by the great dispatch-boxes, or letters and papers captured with balloon-posts, or driving the pen with that tireless hand of his over sheets to be conned by Monarchs and rulers of States—came the Crown Prince of Prussia, handsome and débonnaire, or the dry, withered gentleman who bore the great name of von Moltke, or the War Minister von Roon, or M. Thiers, or the Saxon Minister von Friesen, or the Grand Dukes of Weimar or Baden, or the Duke of Coburg, or the Representatives of Austria-Hungary and Bavaria, or the English Ambassador, who had recently come upon a Mission to Versailles. Night after night, other and stranger footsteps crossed the threshold. Sometimes blindfolded officers in stained and weatherbeaten French uniforms had been led upstairs to that mysterious room where he sat, weaving his huge web of diplomacy, or manipulating with deft, capable touches the threads that moved both men and Kings.
Everyone came to this house on the quiet by-street of Versailles, that had become the throbbing center of the world.... From the greatest to the smallest, from the worthiest to the vilest. Now, last of all came—Adelaide de Bayard.
And with her came the question: How much he suspected. There had been one or two moments when Juliette had been temporarily thrown off her guard. Could one really deceive him, who was so subtle, watchful, observant?... Past master in cunning, ripe in diplomacy....
She heard his heavy footstep on the staircase as she held her bosom and listened. Madame Potier had finished his bedroom, and taken her broom and dustpan to the next. Madame de Bayard had been shown into the smaller interviewing-room, where the Brussels carpet had been paced into threadbare alleys by the feet of men who were topped by aching responsibilities—where the Crown Prince of Prussia smoked his big painted pipe of Latakia as he chatted with the Chancellor—where M. Thiers sat through long ordeals of torture in the little wicker arm-chair.
Would the mother of Juliette de Bayard sit in that chair? Her daughter knew how superbly she would rise and sweep her reverence to the Minister. How smoothly she would pour forth some false and specious tale....
The Minister strode in upon Madame, carrying his cap and riding-whip. His heavy countenance had the healthier flush of exercise, his great spurred boots were plastered with clayey mud. He had but just returned from an early ride with Count Hatzfeldt, taken at this hour "To escape," as he had explained to that elegant functionary, "the detestable clattering and knocking of that female Kobold, whose day it is to sweep my room."
"Why let her sweep?" Hatzfeldt had asked, and his principal had answered:
"I approve domestic cleanliness. And a room that is used as bedroom and study somehow harbors both spiders and dust. And I abhor spiders—nearly as much as cockroaches. Those long-waisted insects that swarm in the conservatory here give me almost a sensation of sickness when they scuttle away from my boots. I find a physical relief, actually, in crushing them."
He experienced something of that nausea and its resulting impulse toward extermination, meeting the bold eyes and the false ingratiating smile of the still beautiful Adelaide. He said, standing huge and adamantine between the woman and the window:
"Be seated, Madame.... No ... not that chair! Possibly I grow old, but I find that I can best deal with certain persons when the morning light is on their faces."
"As you will, Monseigneur!"
Adelaide mentally execrated his coarse brutality as she bit her lip, pulled down her flowered veil more closely, and prepared to sink into the little wicker chair.
"No!" he said, stopping her, "not that chair!—take the other. To my idea the seat you at first selected represents at present the Throne of France, or at least the Presidential fauteuil. M. Thiers occupies it when he comes to see me.... And he is a person whom I hold in much respect."
She winced at the side-thrust.
"I regret, Monseigneur, to have forfeited your good opinion."
"I do not usually bestow my good opinion," he told her, "upon ladies of your reputation, even though I may have reason to praise their sharp wits. Now pray state your business here. My time is limited."
She half rose up with a pained stare of wounded feeling, thought better of it, sank down again amidst her velvets and sables, and recited her lesson as taught by Straz.
The Roumanian, by dint of diligent, patient inquiry, had collected and pieced together with marvelous cleverness, the information gathered, correlative to the movements of Juliette. Her departure from the Prefecture at Bethel, her frustrated journey to the Camp at Châtel St. Germain—her halt at the village of Petit Plappeville, her search for the Colonel upon the battlefield, were all pieces in a mosaic miraculously restored. M. de Straz knew that Count Bismarck had seen and spoken to the young lady—had ordered separate burial for the body of de Bayard. He could even name a soldier of the German burial-party, who had helped to dig the grave. Subsequently Mademoiselle had been seen in company with a young Englishman ... she had returned with him to Petit Plappeville. The village had been raided and sacked by Prussian cavalry. Since when, Mademoiselle, with the young Englishman, had returned to Versailles.... She was occupying the Tessier mansion up to the moment of the arrival of the Chancellor with his Foreign Office Staff. And—by a most curious and deplorable coincidence, from that psychological moment to the present, all trace of Mademoiselle had been lost....
"Consequently," Adelaide wound up her well-conned lesson, "myself and M. de Straz have no resource but to apply to Your Excellency. Naturally M. de Straz desires that the daughter of M. de Bayard and myself should be extricated from a compromising position and placed under our joint guardianship. He takes—such chivalry is innate in his nature—a parental interest in the poor young girl!"
Said the Minister, smiling with cynical amusement:
"Therefore in the interests of Chivalry and Morality—you call on me—as proprietor of the seraglio in which you suppose Mademoiselle to have been hidden away.... You demand"—he struck the riding-glove he had removed upon the palm of the right hand it had covered—"and the hint of such a demand is a menace—do you hear?—a menace—that I should render the girl up to you, or pay through the nose for what I once declined to buy. You think at this epoch in the history of Germany—when the search-ray of international interest is turned upon the doings of that fellow Bismarck at Versailles—that I should not care to be classed with the Minotaurs who devoured youths and virgins. Madame, they were French monarchs, I am only a Pomeranian squire...."
He rose up, towering over the quaking woman, and strode across the shaking floor and pulled the green silk bell-rope by the fireplace. It came down in his hand, top ornament, wire and all, and he said as he looked at it and tossed it from him:
"That is a suggestion on the part of your Fate which I shall not adopt, though I could hang you and your paramour...."
He added, speaking loudly as Von Keudell opened the door, and the wretched woman rose and tottered toward him:
"Did I hold the secret of your daughter's hiding-place, I would not betray her to you....Adieu, Madame de Bayard.... You observe that I do not add, 'andau revoir!'"
The great resonant voice had sounded through the whole house like a beaten war-gong. Lying upon the floor of her room, straining her ears to catch some fragments of their colloquy, it broke over Juliette in waves of thunderous sound.
Jean Jacques, below in the hall, was told by Von Keudell to "see the lady to her carriage," which, in virtue of her appointment, had been admitted through the Tessierporte cochère. The Swiss youth obeyed with even a clumsier grace than usual, the polishing-brush being still strapped about one instep, and the clout still swathed about the other foot, as he hobbled down the shallow doorsteps to open the brougham-door for Madame. As she stepped in and took the seat, her strained eyes leaped at his face suddenly. As he leaned in arranging the rug about her knees—what was it he heard her say:
"You are the English boy I saw in July at the house of M. de Bismarck. Do not attempt to deny; I never forget a face! When can you come and see me?... I must speak to you! I swear to you that I mean no harm to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard!"
Her lips were ashen under their rose-salve. The ringed, bare hand she laid on his rough paw burned like fire. He muttered in the weirdpatoisthat passed as Swiss with some German occupants of the Tessier mansion:
"Madame will pardon.... One does not understand!"
She gave a disjointed, unmusical peal of laughter, that rattled the brougham windows.
"Droll boy! But you will come, whether you understand or not. The Villa Laon, Maisons Laffitte, near St. Germain.... Night-time will be best—to-night or to-morrow night." She added, looking at him over the lowered window as he shut the door upon her: "Ask for Madame de Straz. I shall be waiting for you. Do not forget!..."
The carriage drove on. He stood upon the lowest doorstep staring after it, for only privileged vehicles were admitted by theporte cochère. A hand fell heavily on his shoulder, startling him hideously. A terrible grating voice said in his ear, speaking in the Minister's excellent English:
"So, Madame Delilah has been trying her sorceries, has she? Come this way, my young English friend.... I want two words with you!"
In the Tessier drawing-room, where the carpet was threadbare with the traffic of the feet of Princes and plenipotentiaries, and the brocade furniture was soiled with the contact of muddy breeches, and ragged with the rowels of spurs; where the bronze, bat-winged figure presided over the ancient clock of ormolu and malachite that had marked the passing of so many hours in this the death-struggle of bleeding France, Jean Jacques Potier stood up to give an account of himself, while just without the doorway waited a brace of muscular Chancery attendants, and the gigantic East Prussian coachman, Niederstedt, patrolled the terrace outside.
"You have not forgotten him! He used you somewhat roughly at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse. Nor, as it happens, has he forgotten you. Come!—what have you admitted to that Witch of Endor,la veuve Bayard? You are no friend to her daughter if you have told the woman that Mademoiselle is here, under this roof."
"So you—know?..."
P. C. Breagh had gasped the words out before he could stop himself. The Minister's flashing blue eyes lightened in laughter as they met the appalled stare of the young man with the cropped head and the green baize apron. He said, lisping a little as was his wont:
"I know, and I have known almost from the beginning. Everything must be known in this house. Did you suppose I had left my Prussian Secret Service at home in Berlin? Here! This belongs to you!"
He was standing on the hearth, his great back to the wood fire that blazed on the steel dogs. One of a brace of letters that he pulled from his breeches pocket, and tossed to the culprit under examination, fell at that wretch's feet.
"Pick it up, Mr. Patrick Carolan Breagh," he said. "You will find it a more-than-ordinarily interesting epistle. It was brought me something over an hour ago. Your legal friend, Mr. Chown, of Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London, advises you to go back there without procrastination. Your absconding trustee, Mr. William Mustey, Junior, has been found in Bloomsbury lodgings, the War having apparently frightened him out of France. Odd, because the scent of battlefields proves attractive to birds and animals of the predatory order. Mustey is dead, but luckily for you he has left nearly all of your property behind him. Some £500 of your inheritance of £7,000 seems to be missing. I daresay you will be willing to let the deficit go. What are you saying?"
His victim, with lips screwed into the shape of a whistle, had murmured:
"The Post Office.... Gee-whillikins!... they've given me away!..."
"Given you away!... You are a pretty conspirator!" The masterful eyes flickered with humor. There was amusement, suppressed, but evident, in the lines about the grim mouth hidden by the martial mustache. "Where should my blue Prussian bees gather intelligence, if not at the Post Office? Did you notgive yourself away, as you term it, when you employed the time not occupied in smearing silver plate with whitening, and bedaubing polished boards most execrably with beeswax,—in acting as a voluntary assistant dresser at the auxiliary Military Hospital that has been established under the Red Cross at the Convent of the Sisters of the Poor? When a young Swiss—who is supposed to be ignorant of any language save his own extraordinary gibberish—betrays a more than superficial knowledge of French and German surgical terminology, and evinces a degree of skill in bandaging and so forth, such as you have permitted yourself to display, the German authorities, while they avail themselves of the young gentleman's service, are to be pardoned for supposing him to be other than he appears! Come, it is time this farce of yours and Mademoiselle's ended. I am going to ring the bell, and send for her, and tell her so now!..." The imperious hand went out to the bell-rope of faded red, and he stayed his summons to add: "Then you and she must pack up and betake yourselves to England.... I will furnish you with a permit to travel by railway and alaissez-passer. You will return to me a certain half-sheet of Chancellery notepaper which I gave you in the Wilhelm Strasse last July! Further—I have no advice to give you except that you would be wise not to select the theatrical profession for your next venture. You have not a gift for the stage, unlike Mademoiselle.... As for her, the vixen! you would do well to marry her promptly. Nothing else will cure a young man of the stupidity of being in love!"
There was something horrible in the mere fact of being taken so lightly, when one had waited in tense agony for the ominous flurry in the daytime—expecting in sleepless anguish the cry in the night.... The relief that mingled with the horror caused the muscles of the mouth to relax in a smile of imbecility, made one stutter and gulp because of the choking in one's throat....
The life of this man, who was meant when the great ones of the earth now referred to Germany, had been in hourly peril for months past. Now it was safe. She had not bent one's will, ineffectually, to the effort of restraining another's. One had not kept watch and put in one's word for nothing, remembering the debt one owed to that powerful ruthless hand. Not unheard had one prayed in an anguish of supplication that the woman loved beyond all Ideals, however heroic and overwhelming, might be saved from the fate of occupying a red-stained niche in History.
"Marry her promptly!"
He repeated the words, with the flicker of a laugh playing in his eyes and about his heavy facial muscles. His tortured victim, blood-red to his cropped scalp, groaned out:
"She is married already, Sir!"
"Quatsch!" said the Minister, laughing: "Married she is not. Oh, she has been married as the American canvasback ducks are roasted. She has been carried on a dish through the kitchen of matrimony, and taken out at the opposite door."
"But—my God, sir!—I have seen her husband!" cried the young man desperately.
"When did you see him?" asked the resonant, compelling accents. The answer came, bringing down his frown.
"I—cannot tell you!"
Came, curiously lisped, the words:
"I fear I must compel you. All this may lead to something more serious than I have thought...."
P. C. Breagh snarled, knitting the broad red eyebrows so industriously sooted:
"Twice.... There can be no harm in my saying so."
"And how recently?" The grating voice scooped into one's brain like a dentist's burred scraper. P. C. Breagh shook his head, saying:
"I can't tell you that!"
"Why not, if there is no harm in telling?" The voice was almost pleasant. "Was it as recently as three days ago?"
No answer.
"Was it as recently as two days? ... as twenty-four hours? ... Will you not answer for your own sake?"
The stubborn head was shaken resolutely. The Minister's voice said, blandly, persuasively:
"You may, for all you know, be answering for hers!"
There was a stubborn silence. The Chancellor said, with his suave, but warning lisp more perceptible than usual:
"Be good enough to touch that bell upon the table near your hand...."
P. C. Breagh obliged. Grams and Engelberg presented themselves. The Minister said, looking at them over the head of his sacrifice:
"One of you will convey my compliments to Madame Charles Tessier, and request her to speak to me here and now."
The stalwart, black-clad pair retired. The Minister pulled his cigar-case from his breeches-pocket, selected a cigar, bit off the end, and looked for a match. Meeting the burning stare of the gray-yellow eyes under the broad sooted eyebrows, he did not fulfill his intention of lighting, but restored the cigar to its place.
As he thrust the case back into his breeches-pocket the door opened. Madame Charles came in, wrapped in her white shawl, and moving with her characteristic limp and shuffle. Her glance went to the broad-shouldered, lean-flanked figure of the young man standing at attention a little to the left hand of the Minister. She was aware of the huge shape of the watchful Niederstedt keeping guard outside the terrace-windows. She heard the steady crunching of booted feet upon the graveled stone flags of the conservatory, recalling the fact that the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers were now quartered there. And she said to herself, even as she made her curtsey before the Chancellor: "The hour of discovery has come. Am I sorry or glad?"
The heavy stare met her desperate eyes as she raised them from the carpet. The grim voice began, and she strung her nerves to hear:
"Mademoiselle de Bayard, I have just closed an interview with your lady-mother, who is desirous to reëstablish over your person the maternal authority she once resigned.... That I have not betrayed to her your presence here I think you are aware already. I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that you were listening when I spoke to her loudly just now upon the stairs. Am I right, Mademoiselle?"
She said, meeting his heavy, powerful stare with eyes of burning sapphire, steadily under leveled brows of jetty black:
"It is not for me to contradict a person of Monseigneur's eminence. Might I ask why Monseigneur is pleased to designate me as 'Mademoiselle'? Madame Charles Tessier is my name in this house."
"Mademoiselle de Bayard," he said, ignoring the interruption as a man may when an infant has tugged him by the coat-tail, "I have to congratulate you upon your gift of grotesque character-impersonation, no less than your companion, whose Swiss-Frenchpatois, spoken with a British accent, has never since the first instant succeeded in deceiving me. But as one of my more amiable weaknesses is a liking for children, I must own to having found infinite amusement in the spectacle of Missy and Master, dressed up for grandpapa's benefit, playing the game of 'Guess Who I Am!'..."
He was laughing now, unmistakably. He said, smoothing the heavy mustache with a hand that twitched a little:
"But the performance ends here. So we may lay aside the cosmetics, costumes, and properties. The hero's green baize apron, crop-wig, and blackened eyebrows, the flour with which the heroine sprinkles her black hair, and the stockings and towels with which she disguises her charming shape. It will not seem surprising to you that a person of my dubious character should be learned in the secrets of stage disguises.... My early researches in femininity have led me into queerer places than actresses' dressing-rooms. But where did a Convent schoolgirl gain her knowledge of make-up?"
His mockery was intolerable. Her hate and scorn rose up in arms to meet it. She would be silent only for an instant longer, then she would speak and tell him all.
He was going on:
"I have here a letter, brought me some days back by the Prussian official who is in charge at the General Post Office here in Versailles. It is addressed to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard, 120, Rue de Provence. It is dated from Mons-sur-Trouille, in Belgium, and is written and signed by M. Charles Tessier.... I will not disguise from you that I have mastered the contents."
He showed her the letter. Monster! he had opened it. Her blazing eyes dwelt on him with a contempt he did not seem to feel. She had let the white shawl drop from about her head and shoulders. Now she straightened her slight form—(as though an artist needed the adventitious aid of towels and stockings!)—and thrust back with a superb gesture of both hands the heavy loops of white-streaked hair that masked her forehead and curtained her small face, whose cheeks, previously pale, now burned with angry fire.
He said, and as he withdrew the letter from its envelope, a small, square enclosure wrapped in white paper, slipped from the interior and dropped near his spurred boot:
"I have not only read this, but I am going to read it aloud to you. For the sake of one present whose fidelity to you deserved a confidence you seem to have withheld."
She caught one sharp breath, dropped her slender arms at her sides and stood immovably before him. Her clenched hands, tense lips and tragic brows, with that fierce flame of hatred and scorn burning beneath their shadow, betrayed the test of her self-command as he read:
"BASSELOT & TESSIER.
"WHOLESALE MERCHANTS,"WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.
"MONS-SUR-TROUILLE,"BELGIUM."December 20, 1870.
"MADEMOISELLE:
"Relying on your good sense and amiability, permit me to make you a confession.
"Torn between the urgent commands of filial duty, and the dictates of ardent affection, I have yielded to the irresistible promptings of Love.
"Wedded to her I adore—the name of Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt can hardly be strange to you—I offer you the calm devotion of a brother. My mother is resigned to this alliance, at one time repugnant to her maternal feelings. She desires me to say that your luggage, taken on by her from the Hôtel de Flandre, Brussels, shall be forwarded to you at the Rue de Provence, or any other destination you may choose to indicate. Need I say that Madame Charles Tessier and myself regard you as our benefactress—that you will confer upon us the greatest obligation by consenting to remain beneath our roof.
"I would add that the capital of 80,000 francs invested by your regretted father upon your behalf in the business of myself and M. Basselôt can remain at the interest it at present commands (some 7 per cent. of annual profit), or be transferred to your credit at any agents or bankers you may choose to designate.
"Receive, dear Mademoiselle, with my regrets and excuses, the affectionate souvenirs of myself and my wife. My Clémence encloses some wedding-cake, after the touching fashion of England. She made it, she assures me, with her own hands.
"Respectfully and sincerely,"CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."
The reader added, as he looked about him:
"Where is the wedding-cake?—that white thing! ... thank you!"
For P. C. Breagh had picked the little parcel up and restored it to his hand. He took it, returned it to the envelope with the letter, and said with unsmiling gravity, striking a finger on the envelope:
"In the face of this—are you married, Mademoiselle?"
She answered him dauntlessly:
"No, Monseigneur!"
"Th-then," he asked, with his portentous lisp, "wh-why on earth did you—did you pretend to be?"
She answered with surprising quietude:
"To make my place in this house more secure."
"Ah! Might one ask why?"
He put the question with irony. She answered with astonishing composure and dignity:
"Because at that period I desired to gain the opportunity to—kill you, Monseigneur!"
A sound came from Breagh's throat like a curse or a groan or a sob, or all together. Her clear gaze was troubled for a moment, she caught her breath in a fluttering sigh.
"To kill me?..." said the resonant voice of the great figure that upreared its bulk before the dancing hearth-blaze that threw broad lights and shadows upon the ceiling and walls of the darkly-papered drawing-room. It was a bitter, wintry day of sickly white sunshine, and smileless skies of leaden grayness. Freezing sleet-drops rattled on the terrace-windows, outside which the giant ex-porter of the Wilhelm Strasse waited, blowing from time to time upon his chilly knuckles and beating his great arms upon his vast chest to keep them warm, but never removing the sharp little piggish eyes under his low red forehead from the figure of P. C. Breagh....
"To kill me!" said the Chancellor, as a springing hearth-flame threw a giant shadow of him upon the double doors that divided the drawing-room from the billiard-room, where the staff of clerks and decipherers labored from early morning until far into the night.
In the silence that his voice had broken, his keen ear heard a quill pen buck upon a page. He imagined the splash of ink upon the thick creamy Chancellery paper, that had evoked the "Tsch!" of the dismayed clerk, even as he queried: "Might I ask why? It would be interesting to know."
The firelight was full upon Juliette as she answered:
"Because you have made this War;—because through it I have been orphaned and made desolate; but chiefly because you are the merciless enemy of France. These milliards you would wring from her veins ... these groans torn from her heart ... these indignities to all she holds most sacred!... Your scorn and contempt of these great men—Chiefs of her Government—who have stooped to beg from you consideration ... for these things, see you well—you have been accursed in my eyes. I have said to myself a thousand times, that to kill you would be to save my country, and not a sin unpardonable in the eyes of Almighty God!..."
"Your theology is as defective," said the Chancellor, "as your sentiments are patriotic...." He surveyed the small slight figure before him rather ogreishly from under his shaggy brows. "And so," he said, with his wounding irony, "you thought to play the part of a Judith to my Holofernes—a little skip o' my thumb like you.... My good young lady, had you succeeded in murdering me, how was it your intention to evade summary justice? For you could not have escaped detection.... You must be aware of that!"
She said with her quiet dignity, one hand upon her slight bosom, her clear eyes upon the angry, powerful stare that would have crushed another woman down:
"I should not have tried to escape, Monseigneur!"
He commented sarcastically:
"Fanatics are the most dangerous of conspirators. Life has no value—Death has no terrors for them. They believe themselves superior to all laws, both human and Divine. And how, may one ask, would you have done my business? To have dispatched me by poison would have been easiest, for you have assisted our Foreign Office cook. Yes! Possibly it would have been poison?"
She said between her close-set teeth, hissingly:
"It should, Monseigneur, but for one thing!..."
His powerful glance rested on her curiously:
"Ah, Fury!" he said, and with her wild black disheveled locks, her eyes that darted vengeful blue fire, the gloomy brows that frowned over them, the long upper lip pinched down over the little closely-set white teeth, hers was not unlike the mask of a Medusa, wrought in onyx by the hand of some Greek master dead a thousand years ago.
"Ah, Fury!—and what was that one thing? To what fortunate breakage of pots in the kitchen will the Prussian King owe it that he has still a Chancellor, when he is crowned Emperor of Germany in the Palace of Versailles at the beginning of the New Year?"
Here was news. So the recalcitrant States had at last been ringed in. So the sensitive objections of His Majesty the King of Bavaria had been by some means overcome.... P. C. Breagh drew a sharp breath at the hearing. The speaker flashed upon him a cynical look.
"There," he said, "is a tit-bit for some enterprising Editor, were it possible to get a wire through to Fleet Street. You see what comes, Mr. Breagh, of being false to one's principles. A few months ago you said to me—I have an excellent memory for such utterances: 'It would be better to cadge in the dustbins for a living than make money out of information gained by trickery.' Yet you have not scrupled to live in this house disguised as a common servant. Really, to one who is aware of your ambitions, the whole thing has—a kind of stink!"
The prodded victim uttered an incoherent exclamation. Juliette cried indignantly:
"It is not true! How can you wrong him so? If you do not know what you owe to him, I will tell you. It is he who has saved your life!"
She flamed out all at once into a rage and cried, seeming to tower to twice her stature:
"Because you have robbed me of my father, and because you are the great enemy of France I would have killed you. I tried to hide this from him, and he found it out. He stayed here—at what risk you know!—for my sake and for your sake.... How often has he not said to me: 'You shall not do it. He once saved me!... You shall not do it because he has a daughter, by whom he is beloved, perhaps, as your father was by you!... You tell me that her portrait stands by his bedside. Go and look at it, and you will never be able to do this hideous thing!' And I went and looked at her portrait, and it was as he had told me.... That night I threw away the poison and swore an oath upon the Crucifix, that, come what might, I would never seek your life!..."
"Halt, there!" he bade her, in his rough, masterful manner. "Touch that bell upon the table near you!" he said to Breagh. As Breagh obeyed and von Keudell entered by the door leading from the hall, shutting it upon a glimpse of the stalwart Grams and the athletic Engelberg, "Fetch me that bottle," he said, "that was picked up by the sentry in the adjoining garden. I gave it to you to lock away for me."
Von Keudell vanished. In the interval that elapsed before his reëntrance the Minister turned his back upon Mademoiselle and her comrade, rested a hand upon the mantelshelf, and said, as he kicked back a burning billet that had tumbled out of the heart of the red fire:
"All that about my daughter's portrait isquatsch!" He suddenly wheeled upon Mademoiselle, thundering: "You were frightened. That is why you seized an opportunity to pitch away your witches' sauce.... Confess! Be candid! Have I not read you? Were not your fine heroic frenzies all assumed to impress—him?" He indicated P. C. Breagh by an overhand thumb-gesture. "Was it not for this spoony fellow's benefit you wrote yourself letters from an imaginaryFranc-tireur—full of bombastic vaporings and bloodthirsty denunciations borrowed from the columns of Parisian rags?"
"Monseigneur!..."
She was taken aback. She faltered, flushed, whitened, conscious of the reproachful stare of Breagh's honest gray eyes.
"Did I not tell you?—everything is known to me!... Not only have I read those letters you hid in the mouth of that grinning Pan in the garden—but here is the bottle you threw away!..."
He took it from von Keudell and showed it her—a squat, wide-mouthed chemist's ounce vial, half full of whitish powder, and read from the label:
"ARSENIC: (Poison.)
"The powder as prescribed, to be diluted with Three Parts of Milk, and applied as directed, for clearing the complexion and freshening the skin."
Crash!...
A turn of his wrist, and the corked-up vial flew into the fireplace, smashing on the chimney-bricks and raising showers of crimson sparks from the billets blazing there. A rich incense of scorching wool arose from the Brussels carpet. P. C. Breagh stamped out one red-hot cinder, Von Keudell darted in pursuit of a remoter danger. The Minister himself was fain to extinguish another by vigorous stamps of his heavy spurred riding-boots.
"Take warning," he said to Juliette, a little breathed by his exertions, and wiping his high-domed forehead and florid cheeks with a large white handkerchief, carried, in military fashion, in the cuff of his coat. "In this way dangerous, high-flown emotions should be repressed in young girls, by sensible parents. In what a false and perilous position have your hysterical notions placed you...."
He coughed and hawked, and wiped his mouth with the big white handkerchief, put it away and said, as though trying to lash himself into a rage:
"Foolish child! Silly girl!... Little coquette!—pretending to be married to torture a sweetheart; vaporing of murder—acting the heroine—to take a gaby's breath away!... What you want is a decent, sensible mother to administer a good whipping...."
A shudder convulsed her slight body. In the firelight her face looked rigid and drawn.
He might have pursued, had not the gaby to whom he had unceremoniously referred stopped him by crying:
"Be silent! I will not stand by and listen to such language! I will not permit you to speak to her so!"
"So!" He surveyed the crop-headed, red-faced young man in the green baize apron, with grim incredulity. "You will not permit me to speak! You will silence me?... How?"
P. C. Breagh said desperately:
"I do not know how—but I will somehow silence you!... Perhaps by reminding you that Mademoiselle de Bayard is helpless and unprotected. That she has no stronger champion and no better advocate than a gaby like myself."
"Retire to your room, then!" he said to her grimly. "Henceforth you do not meddle in the kitchen, Mademoiselle. You cook capitally, yourbeignetsare worth a bellyache, but just at this moment I am indispensable to Germany.... Observe! You will remain entirely in your room upstairs, until I decide what is to be done with you!" He added, less roughly: "Madame Potier will attend on you and bring you your meals. And—in compliment to your unflinching candor—I will ask you to give me yourparolenot to attempt to escape!..."
She put up both hands to her eyes, and they were trembling. When she took them away there were tears upon her face.
"Monseigneur, I thank you. I give myparolenot to run away."
"So be it!" he said, and slightly acknowledging her deep curtsey, motioned to Von Keudell to open the door.
She passed out of the room. Von Keudell held open the door for her. As he did so, he glanced toward his Chief for instructions. The Minister said, answering the interrogation in the look:
"No. I prefer to extend to Mademoiselle the semi-liberty of theparole." He added: "Exceptional cases must be treated exceptionally. Upon a different kind of young woman I should promptly turn the key. Tell Grams and Engelberg that they are released from duty outside there. And Niederstedt...."
He whistled, and the great red face and huge unwieldy figure of the East Prussian ex-door porter filled up nearly the whole width of one of the long windows. The red face disappeared as the steam of its owner's breath dimmed the glass, and the effect was so quaint that the Minister laughed irresistibly as he opened the window and relieved the impeccable guard, saying:
"Why, my good Niederstedt, you are frozen—you smoke like a volcano. Go down to the house-steward—tell him to give you some old corn-brandy, hot, with sugar and pepper. That will thaw you inside as well as out!..."
He shut the window, and came back to the fireplace, pushed forward the great green brocade armchair, and threw himself into it, saying as he stretched his long legs out to the glowing billets:
"You may go, Mr. Breagh; there is no cause for detaining you. But while you remain here, revert to your own dress, and leave it to more experienced hands to polish the floor and balusters, to which I adhere like a fly who has walked upon treacle, half-a-dozen times in a day. Remember—I see no reason for denying you reasonable access to the society of Mademoiselle de Bayard—unless she objects to your visits, in which case she will probably notify me!——" He added more genially: "Sit down. Take that chair opposite me.... You need no longer stand in the attitude of a suspected criminal. Indeed, I rather think you have repaid a small service I was enabled to render you in pulling you out of a Berlin crowd, last July. Ah, that reminds me. I must ask you for the return of that paper...." He watched with a slight expression of amusement as P. C. Breagh produced the shabby note-case from a pocket inside his livery waistcoat, commenting:
"Had you been searched, those papers would have betrayed you instantly. One more skilled in the art of disguise would have carried nothing that could afford information. That is a very elementary rule."
P. C. Breagh said, meeting the powerful eyes fully:
"I have already had the honor to explain to Your Excellency that my disguise was not assumed for any purpose but that of remaining near Mademoiselle de Bayard."
He rose and offered the folded half-sheet of Chancellery note to the Minister, who took it, unfolded and glanced at the black upright characters above the signature, then tore the paper to pieces, and, leaning forward, dropped it into the heart of the fire. Then he kicked back a charring log with the toe of his great riding-boot, and said, leaning back in the green armchair:
"Credited—as to your statement about the reason of your impersonation. You should see to it that Mademoiselle rewards such chivalry. As regards the pass I have just cremated—did you find it useful or—otherwise?"
P. C. Breagh said:
"The one and only time I did use it, it proved of service to me. But later——"
"Speak frankly," said the Chancellor. "I have no disrelish for candor, you are aware."
P. C. Breagh said, flushing to the temples:
"Later, the accidental discovery that I possessed it, exposed me to the accusation of being a spy."
"So you chose to do without it?"
"I thought," said P. C. Breagh, "that I would try to do without it. And upon the whole I managed—better than I expected to...."
"To put it baldly," commented the resonant voice of the Minister, "you preferred to travel in blinkers and with hobbles on—for the sake of a scruple of the genteel kind. That is your Celtic blood.... You remind me of the story—I think it hails from Dublin, of the little old spinster lady of high family, who was reduced for a living to hawking pickled pig's-trotters in the streets. She accepted the money to buy the license, with the basket and the first installment of trotters, and went forth into the streets to sell them—but beyond this, as a gentlewoman—her feelings did not permit her to go. So she cried, in a whisper: 'Trotters! who'll buy my trotters! Only a penny! Pickled trotters! Please God, nobody hears me!' ... and nobody did hear her, so that was the end of her...."
He had told his absurd tale with one of those comic changes of face and voice characteristic of him. Now he reverted to gravity, and said, as P. C. Breagh rose to withdraw:
"Go! but remain here as my guest for the present. You are not undersurveillance. But there is one question I must again put to you. What of this mysterious personage who represented himself to you as M. Charles Tessier? You must now be convinced that Mademoiselle knows nothing of him? Well, then, I will repeat the simple questions which you refused to answer just now. Where did you first see him? how long ago? and how many times have you encountered him?"
P. C. Breagh had been first addressed by the stranger when returning from an errand in the character of Jean Jacques. Putting it roughly, about a fortnight back. Since then, he had been twice spoken to by the same man. Interrogated as to the appearance of the stranger, he ruminated a moment, then answered: "The man was of middle height, but broad and tremendously muscular. He was remarkable to look at, very dark; with great black eyebrows, and a profile like that of an Egyptian hawk-god. No! ... He was more like those curly-bearded man-bird-bulls Layard dug up in the mounds of Babylonia and Assyria."
Said the Minister:
"You have answered all my questions in that simile.... The man is Straz the Roumanian, who is supposed to have married Madame de Bayard. What was it she said to you this morning when I had the ill-manners to break upon the lady's confidences?"
Said Breagh, with a pucker between the broad eyebrows that would be red when he had washed off the soot:
"Whatever she is, she is Mademoiselle de Bayard's mother, and I would ask Your Excellency to remember it too."
"Quatsch!" said His Excellency roughly. "Mademoiselle de Bayard—for whom I have a sneaking sort of kindness, in spite of her avowedly bloodthirsty intentions toward myself!—has no worse enemy than that adventuress-mother of hers, and you should be aware of it by this time. In plain words, she visited me in the Wilhelm Strasse upon an occasion you will remember, to offer to sell me Mademoiselle as bait for the better catching of an Imperial fish. I did not take the high horse with her, but refused her simply as declining an unsuitable business proposal." He laughed and added: "These good ladies have conveniently short memories. Imagine her coming to appeal to me to-day, in the character of a bereaved mother with a yearning heart!... Well, now she has asked you to go to see her? Have I not hit it?"
Answered Breagh:
"She told me that I was English, and that she remembered having seen me at Your Excellency's. She asked me where her daughter was, and then—when I pretended stupidity—she laughed, and insisted that I must visit her to-night or to-morrow night. How late did not matter. She seemed certain that I would come."
"Well, you will go to her," said the Minister, "but not to-night, I think! To-morrow night would be preferable!... If you appeared to-night, she would think that you are to be easily got over, and she would not show her hand to you. Go to her late. Twelve o'clock will not be too late for her. Women of her type are usually night-birds—and, besides, most people sit up on Christmas Eve. Report direct to me at whatever hour you may get back. I myself am not likely to turn in before daylight, because the Crown Prince and the three Bavarian Envoys dine here." He added, looking quizzically at the young man: "Now you are saying to yourself, 'That has something to do with the scheme for the accession of the South German States to the North German Confederation.... An agreement has been definitely arrived at. That is why Bismarck let that fat plum drop about the New German Empire just now.'"
He laughed outright as P. C. Breagh reddened, but made no effort to deny the charge, and went on:
"Baden and Würtemburg have come to terms. You cannot use the intelligence before it will be known by everyone in London, so I risk nothing by telling you. Our chief stumbling-block has been the King of Bavaria, who suffers from gumboils, and considers that in turning the Palace of Versailles into a military hospital, we have outraged the shades of Louis XIV., Madame de Montespan, Louis XV., Madame de Pompadour, and Queen Marie Antoinette." He added curtly: "There! be off, and tell Grams to send word to the stable that I am ready for the horses. I ride with Count Hatzfeldt another hour to-day. And change those clothes, if you would have me cease to address you as a footboy.... Clothes cannot make a man, but the lack of them can mar him—if they make him appear a clod."
The horses came, and he rode out with Hatzfeldt. There was a piercing northeast wind and a spatter of freezing sleet, much resented by the Diplomatic Secretary and his thin-skinned thoroughbred, and even displeasing to the Chancellor's great brown mare.
The iron lions of Mont Valérien were growling and spitting shell down into the surrounding valleys, thickly wooded with trees, now stripped—all save the firs and pines—of leaves, and glittering-white with frost. The lakes in the parks were frozen. Hundreds of thrushes drifted like leaves before the icy gale, toward the low-growing coverts of ivy and brushwood. A balloon rose within the Bois de Boulogne, soared, and traveled south-west.
Reaching the Aqueduct of Marly, they dismounted, for the purpose of taking what the Minister termed "a peep at Paris from the platform," and, leaving their horses to the care of the grooms, transferred themselves there.
Behind the Forest of Marly the red sun of December was sinking over the frosty landscape. The Minister glanced casually through his glasses at the ruined houses of Louvéciennes in the foreground, sheltered amidst their clumps of whitened trees; and sweeping over the villages of La Celle and Bougival, looked long toward Fort Mont Valérien, where the great stronghold sat perched on its height with its many windows glowing like furnaces in that fierce reflection from the crimson west.
The line of the Rennes and Brest railway running from Courbevoie through the Park of St. Cloud and Versailles showed strongly held by Prussian outposts. Beyond, between banks dotted with damaged hamlets, and bordered on the north side with fanged ice sheets, the silver-gray Seine wound, flowing sluggishly about her islands, wrinkling her lips in disgust at the jagged buttresses of the bridges that had been blown up. Farther south, over the lopped trees of the Bois de Boulogne, rose the great shining dome of the Invalides, bathed in that ominous ruddiness, looking like a great cabochon ruby studding a shield of silvery-green bronze. For Paris from this point of view is shield-shaped, crossed with the bar-sinister of her historic river; backed with her fortifications as by the enamel-and-silver work of a cunning jeweler; set with points of diamond where the bayonets of a column of marching infantry moved out from the ramparts along the road toward Fort Vanves.
It was frightfully cold. Said Hatzfeldt, stamping to recover the circulation in his numbed feet, and beating his gloved hands vigorously upon his sides:
"How cold!... I can smell more snow. Heaps of it, coming!"
The Chief turned an eye toward the speaker without lowering the glasses through which he was looking. He completed his survey before he said, restoring the binoculars to their case, and speaking with a jarring note of anger in his voice that made the Secretary arch his eyebrows:
"I do not smell what I should like best to smell, and that is, the smoke of a German bombardment!" He added: "We have to thank women and priests, and Jews and Freemasons, if our operations are not conducted as energetically as they should be. To begin with, Monsignor Dupanloup has Augusta by the apron string—the Crown Prince, cajoled by his wife and bullied by Victoria, his mother-in-law—is ready to give up the command if I insist that we begin.... Do you know how many weeks it has taken me to get our Most Gracious to consent that the siege train should be moved from Villa Coublay and placed in position? And then Moltke and the generals asserted that we had not ammunition enough.... Given three hundred powerful siege guns—ninety of them howitzers—with fifty or sixty mortars, and five hundred rounds of ammunition for each—could not we pour sufficient shell into the city to bring her to reason? Give me the post of Commander-in-Chief for twenty-four hours—and I will take it upon myself!..."
Hatzfeldt said mentally:
"Ah, the devil! wouldn't you—and with a vengeance!"
The Chancellor went on, deep lines of anger and vexation digging themselves into his gloomy face:
"Never were two men more reluctant to reap the fruits of a great victory than our Most Gracious and his Heir Apparent—who in this matter, as in some others, needs a candle to light up his head!..."
His face took on a sullen cast. He stamped his foot upon the ground, and bayed out like some deep-mouthed bloodhound:
"If they have no ambition of their own—these Hohenzollerns—do not they owe something to mine?"
He ended, breaking into his great laugh, evoked by something in the expression of his Secretary:
"Here am I—applying to you for sympathy, who are just as petticoat-ridden by your Countess as the King and Prince Fritz by their respective better halves. Have you not your mother-in-law and your millionaire papa-in-law shut up there in the Rue de Helder—to say nothing of your wife's pet pair of pony cobs?"
Hatzfeldt returned, shrugging ruefully:
"I had another letter from my wife about the cobs this morning. Heaven knows whether they are still alive!"
The Minister said with a touch of malice:
"It is quite certain that there has been no fresh meat in Paris now for some time. Except ass and mule flesh at fifteen francs a pound. Dogs and cats are getting scarce, consequentlyragoût de lièvrehas become the staple dish at all the restaurants...."
Hatzfeldt rejoined with a sigh:
"I am not quite sure that a little starvation would not be good for myself personally, and one or two others of the Prussian Foreign Office staff. For there is no denying we eat a great deal too much. Your Excellency knows there are few nights when we spend at the dinner table less than two hours and a half."
The answer came:
"You should eat little for breakfast, and nothing in the middle of the day; then your stomachs would neigh and prance at the dinner call as mine never fails to do. Sometimes you see me dine twice without ill results—as when I am going to the King, who keeps a bad table—and find it necessary to fortify myself beforehand...."
He broke off speaking to cough and expectorate, and Hatzfeldt, noting the deep yellow hue of his jaws and temples and forehead, and the sagging pouches under the great eyes, and the caves that his anxieties and labors had recently dug about them, said to himself that the Chief's health was not what it had been; that any fool could see with half an eye he was terribly liverish; that he slept little and spat bile continually, and that his superhuman capacity for work, in combination with his superhuman powers of eating and drinking, were maintained at high pressure by a remorseless vanity that proved him no stronger or wiser than other men.
What was he saying in tones tinged with mockery, for he had probably taken that reference to the excess of luxury at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence as a thrust directed at himself:
"If you would really like to try high living after the latest Parisian style, I have at home among some letters taken from a balloon captured yesterday the menu of a dinner given at Voisin's on the twenty-first by some rich Americans:Potage St. Germain.... Côtelettes de loup chasseur.... Chat garni des rats rôtis, sauce poivrade. Rosbif de Chameau.... Salade de légumes. Cèpes à la Bordelaise. Dessert, none at all.... I gathered from the same source that the Government are going to take over all private stores of provisions, and that the edible animals confined in the Jardin des Plantes are to be shot and cut up for sale."
"Good-bye to poor Touti's ponies, then," said the Secretary, with resignation, "and possibly farewell also to my hopes of a sturdy son and heir."
"Ah! if things are as serious as that," said the Minister, "you had better telegraph to the Countess. Prince Wittgenstein, Clarmont, and little Desjardin, Secretary of the Belgian Legation in Paris, left there yesterday morning by special permit from General Trochu. All three packed into acoupébelonging to Prince Croy—these equine treasures of your wife's were harnessed to the vehicle. They were to spend the night at Villeneuve St. Georges—and you will probably find them in Versailles when we get back."
He added as the Secretary thanked him with effusiveness:
"As regards the family in the Rue de Helder and your bootmaker—the only man in the world who can turn you out properly!—you may tell them, if you are in communication with them, that until the twenty-seventh of December they may sleep in peace.... As to-morrow is Christmas Eve, that means four unbroken nights of slumber. After that—the Deluge; not of water, but of fire and steel and lead." He added, ignoring the Secretary's start and half-suppressed exclamation: "Call to Reichardt to bring up the horses. I find it chilly—let us be getting back!"
Christmas Eve came with an unloading of all the countless tons of snow that had lain pent up behind those skies of leaden grayness. The Seine froze in thin crackling patches, Paris and the surrounding country lay under two feet of snow. Kraus, Klaus, Schmidt, and Klein of the Army of United Germany told each other gleefully that it was going to be a real German Christmas, after all. Nearly every man had packed up and sent a French clock or a porcelain vase as a seasonable gift to his family in Germany, or some article of furniture of a bulkier kind. Now upon the side of the senders of these love gifts was a great unpacking of strongly smelling parcels directed in well-known characters, and containing cakes, sausages, pudding, loaves of black bread, cheeses, barrels of Magdeburg, sauerkraut, and salt meat to eat with it, sweets, tobacco, cigars, and pipes. Each hospital and barracks, camp and quarters displayed elaborate preparations for merrymaking; the most distant outpost wore a festive air. Wagonloads of holly, ivy, and mistletoe creaked over the snow. Miniature forests of fir trees, large and small, had been cut down, and set up in tubs of earth for the festival.
French eyes regarded these preparations upon the part of their foes with curiosity. For Catholics there would be Midnight Mass at the churches—by consent of the German authorities!—Holy Communion—and some sort of supper—possibly none this War Christmas—upon the return from Church. But this setting out of tables of presents under the fir-branches adorned with colored tapers hung with child-rejoicing trifles such as gilt nuts and gingerbread, apples and sugar plums; this singing of carols; Luther's "Euch ist ein Kindlein heut geboren," with "Der Tannenbaum," and "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht," the frequent references to Santa Claus and his sack, and the Christkind—apparently regarded as a benevolently disposed Puck or Brownie, was to the adult non-German inhabitants of Versailles excessively puzzling, unless they happened to be English Protestants.
Of these honest Britons there was a fair sprinkling, the majority of them being exceedingly depressed and out-at-elbows refugees from Paris, whose exodus from the city in the previous month of November had been achieved under the auspices of the British Government, and the personal superintendence of Lord Henry Fermeroy, Secretary of Lord Lyons's Embassy at Paris, armed with a safe conduct from General Trochu.
Despite his low-bosomed vests, Imperial, and French accent, this sprig of British nobility behaved like a man. From the old lady who brought a tin bonnet box full of jewelry and a case containing a stuffed pug, with the prayer that these heirlooms might be taken care of at the Embassy, and the courtesan, Cora Pearl, who requested formal permission to carry on business, during the siege, under the protection of the British Flag, as from each individual unit of the army of distressed Britishers who flocked to seek his aid or counsel, Lord Henry earned gratitude, and praise, and good-will.
When the provisions and money subscribed to the Fund for the aid of the many destitute English residents in Paris were at an end, he did not hesitate to dip his hand into his own breeches pocket. His shining patent-leather boots carried him not only into the attics and cellars where grim Starvation crouched on a bed of damp straw. They tripped over the Aubusson carpets of the drawing-rooms where Genteel Famine sat sipping hot water out of Sèvres cups, wherewith to quell its gnawing pangs, and retired, without having trodden upon a single corn during the accomplishment of their owner's charitable errand. He bombarded Count Bismarck with official Notes, until he had obtained permission from that grim Cerberus for his little army of refugees to pass the Prussian lines.
Of his dreary three days' journey in charge of the string of country carts containing the exiles, who were permitted to travel to Versailles via the Porte Charenton, Brie-Comte-Robert, and Corbeil, Lord Henry afterward penned a Narrative. Which literary effort, printed, bound in cloth of a soothing green, and adorned with a Portrait of the Author, the young man bestowed upon his friends.
Perhaps you can see the blue eyes of Juliette peering between the frost flowers encrusting the window of her bedroom on the second floor, which commanded a view of the garden of the Rue de Provence.
She had, upon the previous evening, received an intimation from the Minister that she would be permitted to take exercise regularly in the garden between the hours of nine and ten. Thus with a throbbing heart, she dressed the shining tresses so long concealed under Madame Charles Tessier's chenille net and white shawl, and arrayed herself in the plain black silk skirt and bodice that we have seen once previously—looped over a cloth petticoat of the same mourning hue. She sought for, found, and put on the gray velvet jacket trimmed with Persian lambskin, and the little gray toque that matched it, despoiled of its azure feather. These things, with many others, had been packed away in a trunk and stowed in the attic now occupied by Madame Potier, when Mademoiselle had departed for Belgium under the charge of Madame Tessier.
She wound a white silk scarf about her throat, tied on a veil, and found herself wishing for a knot of violets to brighten the pale, somberly clad reflection in the looking-glass.... Color ... and her Colonel's grave lying under the first-fallen snow.... She blushed deep rose for very shame of her own vanity, and then in all conscience the picture was bright enough.
The pleasance, like the rest of the world, lay under a mantle of sparkling whiteness. The orderlies and grooms had already cleared and scraped the paths in the vicinity of the house. The ring of the shovels and the swish of the brooms might be heard in the distance. Mademoiselle sighed, thinking of Jean Jacques Potier.
Then timidly she stole down by the back staircase and passed through the hall door into a world all glittering. The keen air was as exhilarating as champagne. It breathed on her cheeks, and renewed the roses that had bloomed there when she had frowned at the girl in the mirror. The frost kissed her eyes, and they sparkled like sapphire-tinted icicles. She tripped down the short curved avenue, passed the gardener's cottage, and turned into the kitchen garden. Not that she was looking for anybody there.
All through the autumn and winter in a sheltered corner had bloomed a large standard rose tree of the hardy, late-flowering kind. The storms of October had passed over and left its fragrant pink blooms unscathed, the bitter winds and night frosts of November had done no more than brown the edges of an outer petal. The tree in its fragrance and beauty, and its strange immunity from hurt of wind and weather, had been an unfailing source of pleasure to Juliette. When an overblown flower shed its leaves, she had gathered up and kept them. When a new bud plumped and bravely unfolded, her heart had known a delicate thrill of joy.
So Mademoiselle went on into the kitchen garden, whose paths had not been cleared of snow. There was her tree—standing in its corner, but buried to the lower branches in a drift that had formed in this sheltered angle of the southward wall.
The roses had met their match at last. Drooping and yellow, sodden and heavy, they had no more courage or hope to give away. Juliette kissed both her hands to them, in farewell, and turned to encounter P. C. Breagh.
The green baize apron and other integuments of the late Jean Jacques Potier had been replaced by the old brown Norfolk suit so often mentioned in these pages. It had been sedulously brushed and his linen was scrupulously white, and he had bestowed infinite pains upon the knot of the black silk, loose-ended tie. His cropped hair would grow again, and his broad red smear of eyebrow was echoed on his upper lip by a young but decidedly red mustache with rather fuzzy corners. The pleasant lips smiled at sight of her, and a hot flame leaped into the gray-and-amber eyes. Her own could not be likened to sapphire icicles now. They were tender, and her long upper lip was haunted by flying smiles that came, and vanished, and came again.
"It is you! Ah, my friend," she said, "I am so glad—I am so glad!"
He caught the gloved hands she stretched out to him, and held them in his, that were reddened with Jean Jacques Potier's labors, and kissed them eagerly. The little gray gloves were not buttoned—his warm lips feasted unchecked upon each blue-veined wrist, until she told him breathlessly: