Ten days after the sudden departure of Madame Clemenceau from her residence, a little before daybreak, Hedwig came down through the house to draw up the blinds and open the windows. She carried a small night-lamp and was not more than half awake.
It was the noise of the great invention which had turned the tranquil group of villas and cherry orchards into a rendezvous for the singular admixture of artilleries and scientific luminaries. The peaceful villa entertained a selection of them nightly and it is astonishing how heartily the military men ate and the professors drank, for the enthusiasm had turned all heads.
Hedwig entered the fine old drawing-room where the symposium had been held. It was a capacious room, not unlike an English baronial hall, the doorways and windows were furnished with old Gobelin tapestry and the heavy furniture was of mahogany, imported when France drew generously on her colonies. The long table had been roughly cleared after supper by the summary process of bundling all the plates up in the cloth. On it had been replaced, for the final debate, drawings and models of the guns considered absolute after the novel Clemenceau Cannon. On a pedestal-pillar stood a large clock, representing, with figures at the base, the forge of Vulcan; his Cyclops had hammered off six strokes a little preceding the servant's entrance.
"A quarter past six," she said, yawning. "It will soon be light."
She drew the curtains and pulled the cord which caused the shade to roll itself up in each of the three tall windows, before returning to the table where she had left her now useless lamp. With a half-terrified look, she began to arrange the pretty little cannon, exquisitely modeled in nickel and bronze, and miniature shot, shell, chain-shot, etc., which she handled with a curiosity rather instinctive than studied. In the midst of her mechanically executed work, she was startled by a gentle rapping on the plate-glass of a window. The sight of a face in the grey morning glimmer startled her still more, but, luckily, she recognized it. After hesitation, she crossed the room in surprise and unbolted the two sashes, which opened like double doors.
"Hedwig!" said a woman's voice warily speaking, "open to me!"
The girl held the sashes widely apart, muttering:
"The mistress! why the mischief has she come back when we were getting on so nicely."
But, letting the new-comer pass her, she tried to smoothe her face, and don the smile as stereotyped in servants as in ballet-dancers, while she continued the letting in of the daylight to gain time to recover her countenance.
Césarine threw off a cloak, trimmed with fur, and more suitable for a colder season, but it was a sable with a sprinkling of isolated white hairs most peculiar and a present from her granduncle. She tottered and seemed weak, for she had concluded that an affection of illness would aid her re-entrance. As Hedwig extinguished the lamp, she sank into an arm-chair. She curiously glanced around and inhaled with a questioning flutter of the nostrils the lasting odor of cigars and Burgundy, which the air retained. In this gloomy apartment where she had often sat alone, sure not to be disturbed, the suggestion of uproarious jollity hurt her dignity. A singular way to express sorrow and shame at the loss of a wife by calling in boon companions! This did not seem like Felix Clemenceau, sober and austere, thus to drown care in champagne.
"Are you alone, girl?" she inquired, looking round with a powerful impression that the house had unexpected inmates.
"Yes. No one is up yet in the house," responded Hedwig, sharing her mistress' uneasiness, though from a less indefinite reason; "at all events, nobody has come down yet. But how did you see that it was I who came in here before the shades were drawn up?"
"Well, I had made a little peep-hole to see what my husband and his fellow conspirator were about, in the time before they shut themselves up in their studio. But, if it is my turn to put questions," she went on with some offended dignity, "how is it that the back door is bolted as well as barred and that I have had to sneak in like a malefactor?"
"If you please, madame, it is the rule to be very careful about fastening up, since you went away."
"Oh, on the principle of locking the stable-door when the steed—"
"Oh! they fear the loss of something which, without offense, I may say, they esteem more highly than you."
Hedwig answered without even a little impertinence and the other did not resent what sounded discourteous.
"Then they do not lock up to keep me out?" she questioned.
"It might be a little bit that way, too."
"It is a new habit. Did the master suggest it?"
"Not the master altogether, madame, but his partner."
"Eh! do you mean Antonino? Monsieur had already lifted him up to be his associate, his confidant, his friend, to the exclusion of his lawful friend and confidant, his wife—and now, does he make him his partner?"
"No, madame; though he has a good fat share in the enterprise. It is M. Daniels who found the funds for the new company in which the master is engaged, and he manages the house to leave the master all his time to go on inventing and entertaining the grand folks we have to dinner."
"Mr. Daniels! not the old Jew who played that queer straight trumpet at Munich—"
"Yes, the turkophone! Ah, he has no need to go about the music halls now—he is, if not rich, the man who leads rich men by the nose, to come and deposit their superfluous cash in our strong-box."
And she pointed fondly to a large iron-clamped coffin which occupied the space between two of the windows. It was a novelty, for Césarine did not recollect seeing it before. Continuing her survey, it seemed to her that she noticed a different arrangement of the ornaments than when she was queen here, and that the fresh flowers in the vases and two palmettoes in urns were placed with a taste the German maid had never shown.
"Let me see! this Jewish Orpheus had a daughter—"
"Exactly; she never leaves him. She has rooms within his just the same as at our house in Munich. It appears that Jew parents trust their pretty daughters no farther than they can see them. But I do not blame M. Daniels," went on Hedwig, enthusiastically, "she is so lovely!"
Césarine rose partly, supporting herself with her hands on the arms of the chair. Her eyes flashed like blue steel and her whole frame vibrated with kindled rage.
"Do you mean to tell me, girl, that Mademoiselle Rebecca—as her name went, I think—is now the mistress of my house?"
"In your absence," returned Hedwig, drawlingly, "somebody had to preside, for neither the master, the old gentleman nor M. Antonino take the head of the dinner-table with the best grace. It is true that our guests are not very particular if the wine flows freely. I do not think the young lady likes the position, for I know the old, be-spectacled professors are as pestering with their attentions as the insolent officers. She would have been so delighted at the relief promised by your return that she would run to meet you and you would not have been repulsed at the door."
"I daresay," replied Madame Clemenceau, frowning, and tapping the waxed wood floor impatiently with her foot. "I did not care to announce my return home with a flourish of trumpets. I was not averse to taking the house by surprise, and seeing what a transformation has gone on since I went away. Besides, it is desirable, not to say necessary, that I should speak with you before seeing the others."
Hedwig pouted a little.
"You ought to have written to me, madame, as we were agreed, I thought; I have been on tenderhooks because of your silence. I did not even guess where you were."
"I did not wish it known for a while, and even then, it appears, I spoke too soon," said Césarine gloomily.
"You did not want me to know, madame?" questioned the servant in surprise and with a trace of suspicion.
"Not even you," and hanging her head, she sank into meditation, not pleasant, to judge by her hopeless expression.
The servant, who had the phlegmatic brain of her people, was stupefied for a little time, then, recovering some vivacity, she inquired hesitatingly as though she was never at her ease with the subtle woman.
"Is madame going away without more than a glance around?"
"Why do you talk such nonsense?" queried her mistress, looking up abruptly.
The girl intimated that the mysterious entrance portended secrecy to be preserved. And, again, the lady had come without baggage, even so much as in eloping from home. But Madame Clemenceau explained, with the most natural air in the world, that she had walked over from the railway station, where her impedimenta remained.
"Walked half a mile?" ejaculated Hedwig, who knew that the speaker had been vigorous enough at Munich, but, since her marriage, and living at Montmorency, she had assumed the popular air of a semi-invalid, "So you are strong in health again?"
"Yes; but I have been very unwell," replied the lady, sinking back in the chair as she remembered the course she had intended to adopt. "I was very nearly at death's door," she sighed. "I really believed that I should nevermore see any of you, my poor husband and you others. Do you think that anything hut a severe ailment could excuse me for my strange silence—my apparently wicked absence?"
Hedwig went on going through the form of dusting the huge metal-bound chest, which had attracted the mistress' eyes as a new article of furniture. Had her husband turned miser since Fortune had whirled on her wheel at his door as soon as she quitted it? It was not Hedwig's place, and it was not in her power to solve enigmas, so she answered nothing.
"My uncle was terribly afflicted," said the lady.
"Your uncle?"
Hedwig's incredulous tone implied that she had not believed in the authenticity of the telegram.
"Yes; my granduncle. He was within an ace of dying, and the shock made me so bad, after nursing him toward recovery, it was I who stood in peril of death. My friends sent for a priest and I confessed."
The girl opened her eyes in wonder and a kind of derision, for she did not belong to the aristocratic creed.
"Confessed?" reiterated she; "ah, yes; people confess when they are very bad. Was it a complete confession, madame?" she saucily inquired.
"Complete as all believers should make when on the brink of the grave," replied Madame Clemenceau, in her gravest tone to repress the tendency to frivolity, for she had not resented the incredulity as regarded herself.
"I dare say," said Hedwig, who certainly had one of her lucid intervals, "it is as when a body is traveling, one is in such a hurry that something is forgotten. You went away so sharply that you forgot to say good-bye to the master! if you spoke at all! Whatever did the father-confessor say?"
"He gave me very good advice."
"Which you are following, madame?"
"When one not only has seen death smite another beside one but flit close by oneself, I assure you, girl, it forces one to reflect. Oh, how dreadful the nights are in the sick chamber, with a night-light dimly burning and the sufferer moaning and tossing! Then my turn came to occupy the patient's position, and it was frightful. Can you not see I am much altered—horrid, in fact?"
Hedwig shook her head; without flattery, well as her mistress assumed the air of languor, her figure had not been affected by any event since the slaying of the Viscount Gratian, and her countenance was unmarred by any change except a trifling pallor.
"Yes; after my uncle grew better, I was indisposed and should have died but for the cares of an old friend, Madame Lesperon the Female Bard. But you would not know this favorite of the Muses. You are not poetically inclined, Hedwig!" she added, laughingly. Rising with animation, "but that makes no matter! I am glad to see you home again. I thought of you, Hedwig, and I have bought you something pretty to wear on your days out—bought it in Paris, too."
"Is that so?" exclaimed the girl, much less absent and saucy in the curl of her lip; "you are always kind."
"Yes; they are in my new trunk, for which you had better send the gardener at once. He is not forgotten either. There is a set of jewelry, too, in the old Teutonic style. They say now in Paris that any idea of war between France and Prussia is absurd, and there is a revulsion in feeling—the vogue is all for German things. I am not sorry that I know how to dress in their style, and I have some genuine Rhenish jewelry, which become me very well."
"I see that madame has indeed not altered," remarked Hedwig, plentifully adorned with smiles, as the sunshine streamed into the grave apartment. "You have fresh projects of captivating the men!" Césarine smiled also, and nodded several times.
"Here?" cried the girl, in surprise.
"Certainly here, since I understand you are receiving company in shoals."
"That is all over now, madame, and I am sorry, for the callers were very generous to me. It appears that the War Ministry do not approve of strangers running about Montmorency and into the abode of the great inventor of ordinances—"
"Ordnance, child," corrected Madame Clemenceau.
"And the house is sealed up, as you found it, against all comers. We have nobody here for you to try graces upon except Mademoiselle Rebecca's papa—and he being a Jew, you must not go near him, fresh from the confessional."
Madame Clemenceau seemed to be musing.
"I forgot—there's young M. Antonino," continued the servant.
Césarine made a contemptuous gesture, expressive of the conquest being too easy.
"Such sallow youth are best left to platonic love, it's more proper, and to them, quite as entertaining."
"Well, madame," said Hedwig, like a cheap Jack, holding up the last of his stock, "they are the only men I can offer you; for, since we have been firing off guns and cannon, our neighbors have moved away right and left—we are so lonely. No servant would stay a week!"
"Those the only men?" said the returned fugitive; "Hedwig, this is not polite for your master."
"Oh, madame, a husband never counts."
"You are very much mistaken. He doescount—his money, I suppose, if that is his cash-box." And, yielding to her girlish curiosity, she went over to the steel-plated chest and avariciously contemplated it,
"Not at all, madame. That is where they lock up the writings and drawings about the new gun!"
"Oh, what do they say?"
"Nothing a Christian can make head or tail of," returned the servant reservedly. "They write now in a hand no honest folk ever used. An old man who ought to have known better—the Jew—he taught the master, and they call it siphon—"
"Cipher, I suppose? It appears the newspapers are right!" resumed the lady. "He is a great man!" and she clapped her hands.
Hedwig regarded her puzzled, till her brow unwrinkling at last, she exclaimed:
"Upon my word, I believe you have fallen in love with master."
"You might have said: I am still in love. That is why I return to his side."
"If you tell him that is the reason," said this speaker, who used much Teutonic frankness to her superiors, "you will astonish him more than you did me by popping in this morning. He will not believe you."
Madame Clemenceau smiled as those women do who can warp men round to their way of thinking.
"But he will! Besides, if it is a difficult task, so much the better—when a deed is impossible, it tempts one."
"Well, as far as I can see, madame, that is an odd idea for you to have had when far away from master."
"Pish! did you never hear the saying that 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder?' Oh, girl, I had so much deep meditation as I stared at the dim night-light," and she shuddered and looked a little pale.
"Well, madame, I should have rolled over and shut my eyes," said the matter-of-fact maid.
There was more truth in the lady's speech than her hearer gave her credit for. She was no exception to the rule that the wives of great inventors almost never properly appreciate them. By the light of his success, breaking forth like the sun, she feared that the greatest error of her life had been made when she miscomprehended him. In her dreams as well as her insomnia, it was Clemenceau that she beheld, and not the gallants who had flashed across her uneven path, not even the viscount, whose spoil was her nest-egg. Alas! it was a mere atom to the solid ingot which her misunderstood husband's genius had ensured. She had perhaps lost the substance in snapping at the shadow.
"Any way, I love my husband," she proceeded, moaning aloud, and resting her chin in the hollow of her hand—the elbow on the table, to which she had returned and where she was seated. "I am sure now."
"No doubt," said the servant, unconsciously holding the feather duster as a soldier holds his rifle; "madame has heard about our great discoveries in artillery? They are revo—revolutionizing—oof! What a mouthful—the military world!"
"Yes; I read the newspaper accounts during my convalescence," replied Madame Clemenceau.
"Then you fell in love with your husband because of his cannon," said Hedwig, laughing. "I do not see what connection there is between them, and, in fact," reflecting a little and suddenly laughing more loudly, "I hear that cannons produce breaches rather than re-union. Well, after all, if cannons do not further love, its a friend to glory and riches! The Emperor, some of our visitors said, is very fond of artillery, and he will give master immense contracts from the report of the examining committee being so favorable."
"Really, Hedwig, you are becoming quite learned from the association with scientists. What long words you use!
"That's nothing," said the servant, complacently.
"There is no word difficult in French to a German. but I can tell you that, as we cannot live on air, and these promises do not bear present fruit, master has been forced to sell this house."
"Eh! why is that? I like the place well enough."
"You were not here to be consulted, madame, and, we wanted the money. Master does not wish to be obliged to M. Daniels and, besides, he, too, does not get in the cash for his company any too rapidly. Master ran into debt while making his guns and cannon, and we have been pinched for ready money."
"I am glad to hear it!" ejaculated Césarine, without spitefulness, and with more sincerity than she had spoken previously.
The girl stared without understanding.
"I have money—cash—to help him, and it will be far more proper for him to be obliged to his wife than to strangers. Besides, I should not tax him with usurious interest," she said maliciously.
"Money, madame," said the servant with her widely opened eyes still more distending.
"I have two hundred thousand francs, that is, nearly as many marks, coming from my good uncle who is a little late in doing me a kindness—but my attention touched him. But do I not hear steps—somebody at last moving in the house?"
"Very likely," replied the servant tranquilly, "but nobody will come in here, before master has breakfast. Since he stores his secrets in that chest, and no company drops in, this is a hermitage. Mademoiselle Rebecca is not one of the prying sort."
Madame Clemenceau, who had risen with more nervous anxiety than she cared to display to the servants, stood by her chair, looking toward the door.
"Has he talked about me, sometimes?"
"Master? never—not before me, anyway, madame."
"Yet you gave him the telegram that explained all?"
"Yes, madame; but not until some time after your departure and when master had returned from a promenade alone. I know he was alone, because M. Antonino was racing about to show him some of his wonderful experiments."
Beyond a doubt, it was Clemenceau who had stood witness to the tragedy in the meadow. Hence his inattention to the Russian's despatch, which he naturally would disbelieve, and probably to her prolonged absence.
It was humiliating that he had not searched for her.
"What! no allusion to my stay—no hint of my possible return?"
"His silence has been perfect as the grave. Next morning after you left and did not return, master looked at the cover which I had from habit placed for you, and remarked: 'Oh, by the way, you will have another to lay to-morrow, as we shall have two guests for, I hope, a long time.' He meant the Danielses, madame. Their coming made it a little livelier for him and M. Antonino."
"It looks like a plot," murmured Césarine, indignantly, as she pictured the happy reunions out of which she had been displaced in memory—not even her untouched plate left as memento! her chair taken by Rebecca Daniels!
"Mr. Daniels is like M. Antonino, too!" continued Hedwig. "Not only is he getting up the company for the master's inventions, but for the young gentleman's—he has made such a marvel of a rifle—they put a tin box into it, and lo! you can fire three hundred shots as quick as a wink! I walk in terror since I heard of it! and I touch things as if they would go off and make mince-meat of me in the desert to it."
"Never mind that!" cried Madame Clemenceau, testily.
"Although the connection between piping at music halls and enchanting the bulls and bears of the Bourse is not clear to me, I can understand how M. Daniels, as a financial agent, should be lodging under our roof, but his daughter—"
"She is our housekeeper, and, to tell the plain truth, madame, we have lived nicely, although money was scarce, since she ruled the roost. Ah, these Jews are clever managers!"
Césarine did not like the earnest tone of praise and hastened to say bluntly:
"I suppose, then, she threw the spell over him again which once before, at Munich, caused him, a tame bookworm, to fight for her like a king-maker?"
"Mademoiselle Rebecca! she act the fascinatress!" exclaimed Hedwig, with a burst of indignation.
"What is there extraordinary, pray, in a husband, apparently deserted by his wife, paying attention to another handsome young woman?"
"Why, madame, you must forget that master is the most honorable gentleman as ever was, and that Mademoiselle Rebecca is a perfect lady!" Then, perceiving that her enthusiasm on the latter head was not welcome to the hearer, Hedwig, added: "but it does not matter. We are receiving no more company, lest the great secret leak out, and so we don't need a lady at the table. She is going away with her father, who is to open the Rifle Company's offices in Paris, and that's all!"
"It is quite enough!" remarked the other, frowning.
"What is the last word about him?" inquired the servant, "the viscount-baron, I mean."
"M. de Terremonde?"
"Yes; you haven't said a word about him."
"Do you not know?" began Césarine, shuddering as the scene in the twilight arose before her on the background of the sombre side of the room.
"He was not likely to return hereabouts. Master might have tried the new rifle upon him," with a suppressed laugh.
"Well, if you do not know, I need only say that I am perfectly ignorant of his whereabouts. I went to town without his escort, and I suppose—if he has disappeared," she concluded with emphasis, "that he has gone on a journey of pleasure, or is dead."
"Dead," uttered Hedwig, shuddering in her turn, "in what a singular tone you say that word."
"What concern is it of mine?" questioned Madame Clemenceau, pursing up her lips to conceal a little fluttering from the dread she felt at the effectual way in which her lover had been removed from mortal knowledge. "I do not mind declaring that, if I am given any choice in the matter, I should prefer his taking the latter course."
Hedwig's teeth chattered so that the other looked hard at her till she faltered the explanation:
"Your way of saying things, madame, gives me cold shivers up and down the back—ugh! Why, that gentleman was over head and ears in love with you!"
"That is why he probably went under so quickly, and could not keep his head above water!"
"I thought you liked him a goodish bit—"
"I—oh!"
An explosion, very sharp and peculiarly splitting the air, resounded under the windows and caused Césarine to clap her hands to her ears in terror.
"Oh, what is that?" muttered Césarine, with white lips.
Hedwig laughed, but going to the window, calmly replied:
"It is only the master—no, it is M. Antonino, who is trying the rifle they invented. Isn't it funny, though—it does not use powder or anything of that sort—it does not shoot out fire, but only the bullet, and there's no smoke! I never heard of such a thing, and I call it magic!"
"A gun without powder, and no fire or smoke," repeated Madame Clemenceau. "It is, indeed, a marvel!" and she approached the window in uncontrollable curiosity. "Is he going to shoot again?"
"Well, he gets an appetite by popping at the sparrows before breakfast. He is not much of a marksman like master, who is dead on the center, every military officer says—but, in the morning, the birds' wings are heavy with dew, and he makes a very pretty bag now and then. What must the sparrows think to be killed and not smell any powder!"
"I wish you would tell him to go farther, or leave off!" said Césarine, looking out at the young man with the light rifle, fascinated but fearing.
"The obedience will be more prompt if you would tell him, madame," returned the maid, "for M. Antonino would do anything for you. To think that there should really be something that frightens you!"
"After my illness, I am afraid of everything."
"Very well, I will stop him."
Opening the window, Hedwig called to the Italian by name, and said, on receiving his answer:
"Please not to shoot any more!"
"Why not?" came the reply in the mellow voice of the Italian.
"Come in and you'll learn." But she shut the window to intimate that he was to enter the house by the door as he had issued, and hastily returned to her mistress.
The latter had tottered to the side-board, and seized a decanter, but, in the act of pouring out a glass of water, she paused suspiciously.
"Is this good to drink?" she warily inquired.
"Of course, though you are quite right—they do juggle with a lot of queer acids and the like dangerous stuff here! They give me the warning sometimes after theirswim-posiums, as they call the sociables, not to touch anything till they come down, for poisons are about. Ugh! But do not drink so much cold water so early in the morning—it is unhealthy. If it were only good beer, now, it would not matter!Ach, Müchen!" and Hedwig vulgarly smacked her lips.
"After my illness I have been always thirsty, and, sometimes, I seem to have infernal fires in my bosom!" sighed Madame Clemenceau, putting down the glass with a hand so hot that the crystal was clouded with steam.
Her teeth chattered, as a sudden chill followed the flush, and Hedwig shrank back in alarm—the beautiful face became transformed into such a close likeness to a wolf's. "You need not be scared any more, for he has come into the house. Here he is, too!" and she sprang to the door, as well to open it to M. Antonino, as to screen her mistress until she cared to reveal her presence.
Perhaps it was application to the work and not pining over the absence of Césarine, but the Italian showed evidence of sleeplessness and his pallor had the unpleasant cast of the Southerners when out of spirits.
His eyes were enfevered and his lips dry and cracked. He carried a handsome fowling-piece, which presented, at first glance, no feature of dissimilarity to the usual pattern except that trigger and hammer were absent, and the rim of the barrel was not blackened from the recent discharge.
"What did you stop me for when I had hardly more than begun my sport and practice?" he inquired.
"Put down that devil's own gun, sir monsieur," said Hedwig, "if you please."
"Why, what's the matter?" said he, while obeying by standing the rifle in a corner. "I thought you Germans were all daughters or sweethearts of soldiers."
"Ay, and most of us women would make as good soldiers as they have here; but I was speaking because you gave a shock to madame."
Stepping aside, Antonino discovered Madame Clemenceau, who smiled softly.
"Oh, madame!" ejaculated Antonino, at the height of astonishment, not unmixed with gladness. "I beg your pardon; I am very sorry—I mean glad—that is, I was not aware—if I had had any idea you were home—"
"You could not have known," she answered in a gentle voice. "I was too eager to get back, to delay to send a line. As for the noise, another time it might not matter, but I came here by an early morning train and I had no rest before I started. I am very fatigued and nervous, and the shot so sudden, surprised me. For a little while to come, I should like you to repeat your experiments with firearms at a distance from the house. Is—is that the new kind of rifle?" she inquired, with the timidity of a child introduced to the new watchdog.
"Yes, madame!" and his eyes blazing with pride, he proceeded, as he crossed the room and returned with the firearm, "it is altogether a new invention. Master is an innovator, indeed!"
"Do you object to showing it to me?" continued Césarine, pleased that the enthusiasm gave an excuse for her not entering into an explanation of her absence which, even if more plausible than that Hedwig had doubtingly received, would require all of Antonino's affectionate faith in her to win credence. "I do not object. Even those experienced in the old weapons can inspect it and not learn much," he went on, with the same pride; "but I thought it frightened you!"
"It did—it does, but I ought to overcome such a ridiculous feeling! I, above all women, being a gun-inventor's wife! Is it loaded?" she asked, while hesitatingly holding out her hand to take it.
Hedwig had prudently backed over to the window which she held a little open to make a leap out for escape in case of accident. Her mistress took the rifle and turned it over and over; certainly, it resembled no gun she had ever handled before. Its simplicity daunted her and irritated her.
"It seems to have two barrels," she remarked, "although one is closed as if not to be used. Is it double-barrelled?"
"There are two barrels, or, more accurately speaking, a barrel for discharge of the projectile and a chamber for the explosive substance, which is the secret."
"Then you load by the muzzle, like the old-fashioned guns?"
"Oh, no; there is no load, no cartridge, as you understand it; only the missiles, and they are inserted by the quantity in the breach."
"And there is no trigger or hammer!" exclaimed Césarine, not yet at the end of her wonder.
"Obsolete contrivances, always catching in the clothes or in the brambles, and causing the death or maiming of many an excellent man. We have changed all that by doing away with appendages altogether. This disc, when pressed, allows so much of the explosive matter to enter the barrel and it expels the missile by repeated expansions."
"How very, very curious!" exclaimed Madame Clemenceau, returning the piece to Antonino with the vexed air of one reluctantly giving up a puzzle to the solution of which a prize was attached. "I should like you to make it clear to me—"
"The government forbids!" said the Italian, smiling, and assuming a look of preternatural solemnity to make the lady smile and Hedwig laugh respectfully. "And, then, the company we are getting up, lays a farther prohibition on us. However, you are in the arcana—you are one of the privileged, I suppose, and if M. Clemenceau does not expressly bar my lessons, you shall learn how to knock over sparrows for your cat."
"You will instruct me?"
"Most gladly!"
"That is nice of you, and I am so sorry at having interrupted your experiments."
"Thanks; but we have long since gone beyond the experimental stage. I was only trying a new bullet that I fancy the shape of. I ask your pardon for having given you a fright." He took her hand and kissed it. She beckoned to Hedwig as soon as it was released, and smiled kindly on him as she left the room with her servant to dress befittingly to show herself to Mademoiselle Rebecca. Had it been only her husband to face, she might have been content to look dusty with travel as she had to Antonino.
"How you delight that poor gentleman," observed Hedwig, between pity and admiration. "You would witch an angel."
"I am only practicing to enchant my husband, you dull creature!" said Césarine merrily. "He is a great man, and I have been proud of him from the first."
Long after Madame Clemenceau had left the room, the Italian stood in the same position as he had taken after kissing her hand. The mild voice from the pallid but little changed beauty thrilled him as formerly, and went far towards making him as mad as he had been ten days before when she had dropped, like an extinguished star, out of that small system. In her absence, he had regained quiet and some coolness, and believed he had conquered the treasonable passion which threatened his benefactor with disgrace. Had she not disgraced him as it was; had she not run away with another lover?
Clemenceau had not said one word to his associate about the telegram from Paris, which he seemed not to believe, or of the note beginning: "The faithless one," by which Von Sendlingen had been warned of Gratian's absconding and which he instructed Hedwig to place where her master must see it. Hence, the view by Clemenceau of the stamping out of the Viscount-baron, for his accomplices had not let the chance pass when he stumbled into their ambush, in order to see if the Frenchman in jealous spite would assail him.
Clemenceau had recognized his wife and he divined that the lonely man making for the same point was the villain, without understanding into what deathpit he had fallen.
At the juncture of his being about hurrying after his wife, he heard the half-strangled wretch's outcry and the low appeal of humanity overpowering the hoarse summons of revenge in his bosom. But when he arrived at the broken footway bridge, all was over. A little farther, he fancied he saw a shadow in an osier bed, but when he waded to it, all was hushed. He called, but no sound responded. All seemed a vision—victim and assassins.
And his wife was flying, by the train which had merely stopped to take her up. As every resident is known at these suburban stations, he refrained from an inquiry which would have made him a laughing-stock.
Since Césarine had returned, the conflict of duty and passion would be resumed and he felt sure that he had been defeated before. Reflecting profoundly, he could come to no other conclusion than that he ought to shun the dangerous traitress.
As he lifted his head, less troubled after arriving at this resolution, he was not sorry to see that Clemenceau had silently entered the room.
"Oh, is it you, my dear master?" he exclaimed.
It was not easy on that placid brow to read whether he knew of Césarine's return or not.
"Well, are you satisfied with your test this morning?" inquired he. "Have you succeeded with the bullets of the new shape?"
"I believe so," answered Antonino, "for the modifications which you suggested, improved it in every point they dealt with. They go forth clean and the windage is much reduced."
"Is the range improved?"
"At fourteen hundred metres I put two elongated balls into an oak so deeply that I could not dig them out with my knife. They struck very closely to one another. It is a hundred metres greater distance. Inserting the bullets by the mass of twenty-five and firing the two took four seconds. I was less careful about marking where the others struck, and one that I discharged on my return near the house broke and went badly askew. With bullets made by regular moulders, such an accident should not happen."
"Have you any left? Let me see."
Antonino took two bullets from his waistcoat pocket; they were unlike the ordinary globules, and resembled the long, pointed cylinders of modern guns. With a pair of pocket plyers, he broke one to exhibit the interior to Clemenceau; it was composed of two metals in curiously shaped segments and a chamber in one end contained a loose ball of another and heavier metal, on the principle of the quick-silver enhancing the force of the blow of the "loaded" executioner's sword. All had a novel aspect, but the chief inventor was familiar with the arrangement.
"By the cavity in it I have reduced the weight of three to two," went on Antonino. "I am in hopes to put in fifty or sixty bullets at a time without making the arm too heavy, and that would suffice, considering that the replacement of the mass of projectiles requires no appreciable time, while the supply of explosive, liquefied air suffices for three hundred discharges. The repetition of the emissive force does not jar the gun, and the metal of our alloy does not show a strain although the gauge induces a pressure of fifty thousand pounds per square inch if it were accumulated."
"And the injection valve?"
"It works as easily by pressure on the disc, which replaces the trigger, perfectly."
"That was your idea."
"After you put me on the track," returned the Italian, gratefully. "Oh, I am still very ignorant in these matters."
"Not more than I, a few months ago. I had not handled a firearm until—" he checked himself and frowned; then, tranquilly resuming, he said: "Labor, and you will reach the goal!"
Antonino looked on silently as his instructor took the gun and inserted the bullet, but when he was going over to the open window, with the evident intention to fire off into the garden, he followed and laid his hand on his arm, saying animatedly:
"Do not fire!"
"Why not?" returned Clemenceau, but without astonishment. "We live in a desert since we have frightened our neighbors away. For two leagues around, nobody is about at this hour and everybody within our walls is accustomed to the noise of the gas exploding."
"Not everybody," remonstrated Antonino. "Madame Clemenceau has returned home and the sound frightens her because so strange."
"It is so. That's another matter," replied the inventor, putting the rifle down in the corner without haste.
"Did you know it? Have you seen her?" cried Antonino, struck by the remarkable unconcern of his master.
"I knew of it by seeing her, yes, as I was coming down stairs a while since—she was going to her rooms from this one, with her maid."
"It's a lucky thing that Mademoiselle Daniels refused to occupy them!" exclaimed Antonino. "Why did you not speak to your wife?"
"Because I can have nothing to say to her and she would speak to me nothing but lies," said Clemenceau in so severe and convinced a tone that the young man remained silent, hurt at the judgment pronounced upon his idol by its own high-priest. "What are you brooding over?" he inquired, after an embarrassing pause.
"My dear master, I think that I ought to ask leave of absence since I have finished the work of designing the bullet most fit for the gas-rifle."
"Do you ask leave of me, at your age, as of a schoolmaster?"
The relations between the adopted son and the architect, who had mistaken his bent and become an innovator in artillery, had been affectionate, and on the younger man's side respectful. He had never taken any serious steps without asking his consent.
"Well, where did you think of going?" asked Clemenceau.
"To Paris."
"To show the rifle and projectile complete? No, we can test the latter at the new series of firing experiments before the Ordnance Committee. The Minister of War and the Emperor will not thank you for disturbing them for so little. It was the great gun they wanted. They are wedded to the Chassepot for the soldier's gun and, besides, the government musket factories are opposed to so great a novelty."
"I need exercise—action—the open air," persisted the Italian.
Clemenceau shook his head. Only the day before, the young man had called himself the happiest soul in the world and did not wish to quit tranquil Montmorency.
"Well, after you have had your fling, would you hasten back?"
"I—I fear not, master," said he. "I daresay if you and M. Daniels should approve, I might have a situation to travel for the Clemenceau Rifle Company, for some months, in England or America—and explain the value of your invention."
"You wish to be my trumpeter, eh?" said the Frenchman, sadly smiling. "But what is to become of me during your absence and of M. Daniels? Remember that I have nobody to understand me, sympathize with me, become endeared to me, and aid me!"
"I, alone?" repeated the Italian, affected by the melancholy tone common to the man of one idea who must, to concentrate his thoughts, set aside other ties of union with his race.
"Do you doubt it?"
Antonino felt no doubt. He would be the most to be deplored among men if he were not fond of Clemenceau after all that he had done for him. He was an orphan vagrant, next to a beggar, when he had been housed by him, kept, and highly educated. Then, too, with a frankness not common among born brothers, the Frenchman had associated him in all his labors for the revolution in the science of artillery—the greatest since Bacon discovered gunpowder. All that he was, he owed to the man before him.
"Believe me, father," he said, earnestly, "I esteem and venerate you!"
"And yet you keep secrets from me!" reproached Clemenceau.
"I—I have no secrets."
"I see you are too serious."
"I am only sorrowful—sorrowful at quitting you."
"Why should you do it, I repeat?"
"I am never merry—happiness is not my portion," faltered Antonino, not knowing what answer to make.
"That's nothing. Better now than later! At your age, unhappiness is easily borne—it is only what the sporting gentlemen call a preliminary canter. Wait till you come to the actual race!"
"I am not fit to dwell with others—with grave, earnest men; I am too nervous and impressionable."
"Because you come of an excitable race, and your childhood was passed in too deep poverty. You will grow out of all that, gradually. Stay here; oh, keep with me, for I have need of you and you require a companion-soul, soothing like mine. The kind of disappointment you experience is not to be cured by change of place. You carry it with you, and distance increases and strengthens it, and whenever you meet the object again to whom was due the vexation you will perceive that you went on the journey for no good."
Antonino looked at the speaker as one regards the mind-reader who has answered to the point. Clemenceau fixed him with his serene, unvarying eyes, and continued, in an emotionless voice, like a statue, speaking:
"You are in love—and you love my wife."
Antonino started away and involuntarily lifted his hands in a position of defense. Averting his eyes and unclenching his fists, he muttered sullenly:
"What makes you suppose that?"
"I saw it was so."
At the end of a silence more burdensome than any before the younger man found his voice and, as though tears interfered with his utterance, said pathetically, and indistinctly:
"Do you not acknowledge, master, now, that I must go; for when I am far away, perhaps you will forgive the ingrate!"
Looking at the young man of two-and-twenty, Clemenceau knew by his own infatuation at the same tender age with the same woman, that he had nothing to forgive him for—little to reproach him. It was youth that was to blame, and it had loved. No matter who that Cytherean priestess was, he must have adored her whether sister, wife or daughter of dearest friend, teacher and paternal patron. But it was clear from the grief that had made the youth a melancholy man that he was honorable.
Grief is never, when the outcome of remorse, a useless or evil feeling. It is a fair-fighting adversary which has only to be overcome to be a sure ally, always ready to defend and protect its victor. In his own terse language, that of a mathematician and mechanician who knew no words of double meaning.
Clemenceau told the Italian this.
"With your youth and your grief, such a spirit as yours and such a friend as you have in me, Anto," he said, "you possess the weapons of Achilles."
Antonino thought he was mocking at him and frowned.
"You think I am sneering? Or merely laughing at you? Alas, it is a long while since I indulged in laughter. It was this woman, with whom you have fallen in love, who froze the laugh forever on my lips! she would have been the death of me if I had not overruled her and exterminated her within my breast. How I loved her! how I have suffered through her—enough to be our united portions of future pain—suffer you no more, therefore. You are too young, tender and credulous to try a fall with that creature. She must have divined long ago that you were enamored of her. She is not too clear-sighted in all things, but she sees such effects by intuition. It is very probable that she has returned to this house on your account, so suddenly. I could guess that she was on the eve of flight, but not that she would return. She always needs fresh sensations to make herself believe that she is alive, for she is more lifeless than those whom she robbed of life."
Antonino did not understand the allusion, for he had never felt less like dying than since Césarine had been seen again.
"I mean that she sends the chill of death into the soul, heart and brain of man, and it congeals the marrow in his bones!" said Clemenceau, energetically. "You may say that if she is a wicked woman and if, whatever her defense, her absence covers some evil step, I ought to separate from her. It is all the present state of the law allows. But while her absence would have prevented you, or another friend, from meeting her, still she would have borne my name. That name I am doubly bound to make honorable, for it was stained with blood—that of one of her ever-accursed race. My father won an illustrious name and, her ancestress, whom he married, was dragging it publically in the mud amid all the scandals of society, when he slew her on her couch of gilded infamy. Ashamed of this name—not because he was indicated under it, but because she had so vilified it—his greatest desire to the friends who visited him in the condemned cell, was to have me, his son, change it. They had me brought up at a distance under the name of Claudius Ruprecht. It might even have happened that another country than that of my birth would receive the glory which a heaven-sent idea is to bestow upon France. Now, I am more than ever determined that her venom shall not sully me. She may cause a little ridicule to arise, but that I can scorn. The laugh at Montmorency will not reach Paris, far less echo around the globe! For a long time I hoped to enlighten her and redeem her, but I have failed. But I am bound to enlighten you and save you, am I not? From the feeling you harbor can spring only an additional shame for Césarine, and certain, perhaps irreparable woe for you. Stop, turn about and look the other way. A man of twenty, who may naturally live another three-score years and work during two of them, who would talk to you of that nonsense, love's sorrow? That was all very well once, when the world revolved slowly and there was little to be done by the people who blocked nobody's way. But these are busy times and things to be done cannot wait till you finish loving and wailing, or till you die of a broken heart without having done anything for your fellow men."
"Bravo!" exclaimed the sympathetical and easily aroused Italian, grasping the speaker by the hand and pressing it with revived energy. "My excellent leader, you are right!"
"And by and by," said the other, with an effort, as though he had to master inward commotion, "when you win a prize from your own country and you look for household joys more agreeably to reward you, you may find one not far from here at this moment to be your wife. For, generally, the bane is near the antidote—the serpent is crushed under the heel next the beneficent plant which heals the bite."
"Rebecca?" questioned the young man in amazement. "But if I can read her heart as you do mine, master, Rebecca Daniels loves you."
"She admires me and pities me, Antonino," replied Clemenceau, hastily, as if wishful to elude the question. "She does not love me. Besides, that is of no consequence. I have no room for love again—always provided that I have once loved. Passion often has the honor of being confounded with the purer feeling, especially in the young. Did I love that monster—for she is a monster, Antonino—I might forgive, for love excuses everything—that is true love, but it is rare as virtue—common sense and all that is truth. To the altar of love, many are called, but few elected, and all are not fit.
"I see you are not convinced, because the dog that bit me is so shapely, and graceful and wears so silky a coat! Such dogs are mad and their bite in the heart is fatal and agonizing unless one at once applies the white hot cautery. The seam remains—from time to time it aches—but the victim's life is saved that he may save, serve, gladden his fellow men. Would you rather I should weep, or force a smile, and appear happy for a period? In any case, since I have cured the injury and she is in my house again, I shall not retaliate on her. But if she threatens to become a public danger—if she bares her poisonous fangs to harm my friend—my son—another—let her beware!"
"Master," stammered Antonino, beginning to see the temptress in the new light, as Felix had often shown him other objects to which he had been blind, "you may or may not judge her too harshly, but you certainly judge me too leniently. Better to let me go away, and far, or at least, since you began the revelation, make the evidence complete of your trust and esteem."
Clemenceau saw that the young man still believed in Césarine, but he did not care to tell him all he knew of her. Had he been told that she had encouraged Gratian to flee with her and had abandoned him at the first danger, without lifting a finger to save him, or her voice to procure him succor, he might loathe and hate her; but Clemenceau meant to say nothing. Such revelations, and denunciations are permissible alone to wrath, revenge, or despair, in the man whose heart is still bleeding from the wound made in it so that his outburst is sealed by his blood.
"No, Antonino, by my mouth no one shall ever know all that woman has done—or what victories I have won over myself—in severe wrestlings."
"I see you have forgiven her," said the Italian, advancing the virtue in which he was deficient.
"I have expunged her from my heart," answered Clemenceau firmly. "She is a picture on only one page of my life-book, and I do not open it there. Knowing my secret, you are the last person to whom I shall speak of Césarine's misdeeds. I wish your deliverance, like mine, to be owed to your will, but you are free and have been forewarned, so that you will have less effort to make than I. Let the scarlet woman go by and do not step across her path. Between two smiles, she will dishonor you or deal death to you! She slays like a dart of Satan. That is all you need know. But, as, indeed, you deserve a token of esteem and confidence from your frankness, affection and labors, I will give you one."
Having seated himself, he drew from an inner pocket a paper written in odd characters.
"The time of my giving you the proof of trust should make it more sacred and precious still. I have found the solution of the last problem over which we pored. You know that while we discovered the means of imprisoning the gas in a concentrated form of scarcely appreciable bulk, it was not always our obedient slave, we had the fear that sometimes it would not submit to being liberated by piecemeal but would now and then disrupt its containing chamber in impatience, and then the holder would certainly die, choked if the fragments of the gun had not fatally lacerated him. After many days and nights, I have found the simple means to render the gas innocuous except in the direction to which we direct its flow. I have written out the formula, in the minutest particulars and in the cipher which you and I alone understand. In the same way we two share the secret of this safe."
He handed Antonino a peculiar key and he went to unlock the coffer which had aroused Madame Clemenceau's curiosity.
"Lock it up with the other papers," concluded the inventor. "I appoint you its keeper while I live—my heir and the carrier out of the work after my decease, should I die before having proved what I consign there. What matters it now if my material form disappears when my spirit lives on in thee! Well," he said, as Antonino returned, after closing and fastening the chest, "do you need any farther proof of the confidence I have in you?"
Antonino grasped his hand and wrung it fondly When both had recovered calmness, they went on speaking of their work, which might be considered past the stage when the projector is racked by misgivings. They went into the breakfast-room together, prepared to bear the singular meeting with the errant wife whose return was so unexpected. But she preferred not to take the step so soon, and, as Rebecca also kept away, warned by Hedwig, who might appear at the board, the three men took their meal together.