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Title: The Man of Iron

Author: Richard Dehan

Release date: January 24, 2025 [eBook #75200]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1915

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN OF IRON ***






  THE
  MAN OF IRON


  BY

  RICHARD DEHAN


  AUTHOR OF
  BETWEEN TWO THIEVES, ONE BRAVER THING,
  (THE DOP DOCTOR), ETC.



  NEW YORK
  GROSSET & DUNLAP
  PUBLISHERS




  _Copyright, 1915, by_
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

  _All rights reserved, including that of translation
  into foreign languages_

  _February, 1915_




PREFACE

_For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose of July
had flamed into splendid bloom.  I drew breath, for my task
approached its ending, and looked up from the yellowed newspaper
records of a great War waged forty-four years ago._

_Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the
web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes....
Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a
man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail._

_For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across
the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant
thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea.  One opal dawn showed the
grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and
war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green
line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a
school of submarines.  Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately
whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights.
Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code.  Gulls
cradled on the glassy waters of the Channel must have been roused by
outbursts of full-throated British cheering, and the crash of the
Fleet bands striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders
of the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship commanding
the Southern Fleet.  No sound reached us ashore but the hush of the
waves, the whisper of the night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of
the mousing owls on Muttersmoor.  Yet what we saw that night was the
awakening of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is not
past and gone._

_Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed solidity.
The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the soil of a neutral
country, demolishing the matchless heirlooms of Art and the priceless
treasures of Literature, bringing down in gray fragments the glories
of Gothic architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and
shattering the House of Life.  The galleries and cabinets of noble
and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are plundered._

_We have lived to see the War of Nations.  We are in it: fighting as
our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are fighting; for racial
name, national existence, social independence, and freedom of bodies
and souls.  And this being so, I see no cause to blot a line that I
have written.  For the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914.
The New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead days I
have tried to vivify._

_The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly,
but not in defiance of the Rules that govern the Great Game.
Treaties were held as something more sacred than scraps of paper.
Blood was lavishly poured out, gold relentlessly wrung from the
coffers of a vanquished and impoverished State.  Things were done--as
in the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the world
shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing.  Kings and
nobles made War like noblemen and Kings._

_Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up stone by
stone the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted
and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and
terrors of the soul.  "_But for me,_" he is reported to have said,
"_three great wars would not have been made, nor would eight hundred
thousand of my fellow men have died by violence.  Now, for all that I
have to answer before Almighty God!_" ... Could the relentless
exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the
imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under
the hands of his successors--might he have known what Dead Sea fruit
of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of
Germany, was fated to bring forth--he would have drunk ere death of
the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he would have seen in the
shape of his pupil the grotesque, distorted image of himself._

RICHARD DEHAN.

SOUTH DEVON, November, 1914.




THE MAN OF IRON


I

When Patrick Carolan Breagh attained the age of six years, the boy
being tall enough to view his own topknot of scarlet curls and
freckled snub nose in the big shining mirror of his stepmother's
toilet-table, without standing on the tin bonnet-box that was kept
under the chintz cover, or climbing on a chair,--he was fated to
acquire, during one brief half-hour's concealment under a Pembroke
table, more knowledge of Life, Death, and the value of Money, than
would otherwise have come to him in the course of half a dozen more
years.

Upon this unforgetable third of January, his plaid frock had been
taken off and, to his infinite delight, replaced by a little pair of
blue cloth breeches and a roundabout jacket.  Amateurish as to cut,
the nether garments displaying so little difference fore and aft that
it did not matter in the least which way you faced when you stepped
into them, they were yet splendid,--not only in Carolan's eyes.
Alan, his junior by three years, bellowed with envy on beholding
them; and four-year-old Monica sucked her finger and stared with all
her might.

It was plain to Carolan that, having once assumed the manly garments,
no boy could be expected to put on those hateful petticoats again.
In vain Nurse Povah,--who had been Carolan's foster-mother,--and Miss
Josey, the governess, explained to him that the breeches were not
completed, and directed his eyes to the mute evidence of pins,
chalk-marks, and yellow basting-threads.  Their arguments were vain,
their entreaties addressed to deaf ears.  An attempt to remove the
cause of contention by force resulted in Nurse's being butted, though
not hard! and Miss Josey kicked with viciousness.  In the confusion
that ensued, the rebel effected an escape from the scene of combat.
And the door of the sitting-room being open, Carolan trotted across
the Government cocoanut matting of the landing with the intention of
confessing his own misdeeds, since Miss Josey was quite certain to
report him at headquarters, had not this often-tested method of
blunting the edge of retributory justice failed, through his own
fault.

For upon entering the large, shabbily furnished room, situated on the
second floor of a gaunt, gray stone building known as Block D,
Married Officers' Quarters--the room that served Captain Breagh and
his second wife as sitting-room, dining-room, smoking-room and
boudoir--Carolan became aware that his stepmother, quite unconscious
of his intrusion, was dusting the china vases on the mantel-shelf,
and was instantly possessed by the conviction that it would be huge
fun to hide under the large round table that occupied the middle of
the worn Brussels carpet, and bounce out upon the poor lady when she
turned, making her say "Owh!"

So the boy noiselessly dived under the deep, hanging, silk-fringed
border of the Indian shawl that covered the circular Pembroke table,
upon which were ranged, about a central basket of wax fruit and
flowers, gilt frames with spotty daguerrotypes, albums of scraps,
Books of Beauty containing the loveliest specimens of Early Victorian
female aristocracy, and Garlands of Poetry reeking with the
sentimental effusions of Eliza Cook and L.E.L., interspersed with
certain card-cases and paper-knives of Indian carved ivory and
sandal-wood, and other trifles of brass and filigree ware.

The big, shabbily furnished second-floor room had three windows
looking out upon the graveled expanse of the Parade-ground, and
commanding a view of the flower-bedded patch of sacred green turf,
inclosed by posts and chains, that graced the front of the pillared,
pedimented, and porticoed building that housed the Officers' Mess.
And when the regiment got the route for another garrison town, nearly
everything the room contained--from the Pembroke center-table and
chintz-covered sofa, to the secrétaire at which Captain Breagh penned
his letters, the big leather-covered arm-chair in which he sat, and
the Bengal tiger-skin hearthrug,--would be packed,--with the picture
of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Vimiera, and the
chimney-glass over which it always hung--into wooden cases, with the
before-mentioned chimney-glass, curtains and carpets, beds, baths,
uniform-cases and a great number of other things; and then after a
period of rumbling confusion there would be a new sitting-room
looking on another barrack-square, other bedrooms and a fresh
nursery,--and Carolan would forget the old ones in something under a
week.  As a matter of fact, the regiment had been shifted four times
since its return from India, when Carolan was little more than a
baby, and Monica and Alan and Baba were nowhere at all.

Now either Mrs. Breagh occupied an unconscionable time in dusting the
vases and making up the fire for her Captain, who by reason of long
service with the regiment in the East was susceptible to chill; or
Carolan, with the mental instability shared by the child and the
savage, lost interest in his new project and abandoned it.  He was
squatting silently in his hiding-place when Miss Josey entered; he
heard her complaint, noted down two spiteful exaggerations and one
malicious falsehood, and witnessed the exhibition of a bulgy ankle in
a badly-gartered white cotton stocking surmounting an elastic-sided
cloth boot.  When the governess withdrew, consoled by Mrs. Breagh's
sympathy, Nurse Povah was summoned from the other side of the landing
by a tinkle of the hand-bell, and bore stout witness on the culprit's
side.

"Did ye see her leg, I'd make so bould as ask, or did ye take her
worrud for ut?  And--av there was anythin' to show barrin' a
flaybite, is ut natheral a boy wud parrut wid his furrst breches
widout a kick?  Sure, they're the apple av his eye, and the joy av
his harrut!  And her--wid her talk av bendin' his will and breakin'
his temper!  is ut like ye wud lay a finger on the Captain's eldest
son, to plaze the likes of her?"

"The Captain has said himself--over and over--that a sound thrashing
would be a capital thing for Carry," Mrs. Breagh returned.

"He praiches--ay, bedad!--but does he ever practuss?" demanded Nurse,
smoothing her apron with stout, matronly hands, and getting very red
in the cheeks.  "Niver fear but he'd be too wise to bring a curse
upon himself by ill-thrating a motherless child!"

"_Motherless!_"  What did the word mean?  Carolan wondered, recalling
how Nurse would describe some particularly down-hearted person as
being as long in the jaw as a motherless calf.  And now Mrs. Breagh
was saying, in the kind of voice some good people use for the purpose
of Scriptural quotation, and which is not in the least like their
accents of every day...

"Solomon said, 'He that spareth the rod'--but you Catholics never
seem to read the Bible.  And I always treat Carolan as if he were my
own child--and you know I do!  'Ssh!  Here comes the Captain--and I
_think_ I hear Baba crying...."

And Nurse, with the honors of war, retired to the nursery on the
other side of the landing, as Captain Breagh's hasty footsteps and
the jingle of his scabbard were heard on the stone stair.  A minute
later he entered the room.  But during the minute's interval Carolan
had had time to ponder, mentally digest and form a conclusion from
what he had just heard.

It had never previously occurred to him that the stout, dark,
beady-eyed, brightly dressed lady whom he had been taught to call
Mamma was not really his mother, but he knew it now.  It was revealed
to him in one lightning-flash of comprehension that this was the
reason why her hands felt so like hands of wood whenever they touched
him, and why her kiss,--religiously administered night and
morning--was a thing he would much sooner have gone without.  He
knew,--and something inside him was glad to know--that it was not
wicked of him not to love her as he loved Nurse, or Monica, or Ponto
the brown retriever.  And then his heart dropped like a leaden
plummet to the pit of his infant stomach.  This was to be a day of
discoveries.  He had discovered that by kicking out lustily it had
been possible to resist the forcible removal of his new breeches.  He
had discovered that "Mamma" was not his real, real mother!  Would
Daddy turn out to be Monica's and Alan's and Baba's Daddy, and not
Carolan's, after all?

A sob rose in his throat, and his hot, dry eyes began to smart and
water.  But the manly trampling and clanking came nearer.  The door
opened--his father was in the room.  He could only see his shiny
Wellington boots, and the bottoms of the red-striped dark blue
breeches that were strapped over them.  But familiar knowledge built
from the boots the handsome manly figure in the light brick-red coat
with the Royal blue facings, the China and Punjab war-medals, the
crimson sash and the other martial accouterments topped by the stiff
leather stock, and the head whose wealth of jet-black curls and
luxuriant bushy whiskers might have been the glory of a fashionable
hairdresser's window; in combination with the well-cut features,
light blue eyes, and fine rosy complexion, as yet scarcely
deteriorated by Mess port, whisky punch, and late hours.

Captain Breagh kissed Mrs. Breagh with a hearty smack that made
Carolan start in his hiding-place, and said the wind was enough to
cut you in two, and that the fire looked tempting; as he laid down
his pipeclayed gloves and dress-schako with the gilt grenade and
white ball-tuft on the aged and dilapidated sideboard, and permitted
his lady to relieve him of his sword.  Then he rubbed his hands and
thrust them to the blaze enjoyingly, and threw himself into the
creaking leathern arm-chair.  This, it suddenly occurred to Carolan,
would be a favorable moment for emerging from concealment.  He had
got on all-fours, ready to appear in the character of a bear or
tiger, when Mrs. Breagh stopped him by beginning to tell tales.  The
child was beyond control, she declared--there was no end to his
naughtiness.  For the sake of his immortal soul, something would have
to be done....

"What's he been doing?  For my own part,--I wouldn't give a brass
farthing for a pup that wouldn't bite, or a boy that wouldn't show
fight when he was put to it!"  The arm-chair creaked suggestively as
the Captain stretched out his legs, and the firelight danced in the
polish of his boots, hardly dimmed by the dry gravel of the
Parade-ground.  "And it's in the blood, that high spirit.  Don't
suppose I'm bragging that the Breaghs are any great shakes in the way
of family!--though the name's as decent a one as you'll meet in a
long day's march.  But Carolan's a Fermeroy on the mother's side--and
they're a hot-headed, high-handed breed," the Captain added, taking
the newspaper from the Pembroke table, "and have been ever since the
year One--if you take the trouble to look 'em up in Irish History.
Not that I've ever read any, but my poor Milly used to say----"

His wife's eyes snapped with irrepressible jealousy at the reference
to her predecessor.

"And everything that came from her you took for Gospel, I suppose?"

"Pretty near!" said Captain Breagh, and began to unfold his newspaper.

"I get little enough time for reading things that are useful," said
Mrs. Breagh, as the Captain dipped into the crackling sheets.  "It
was my bounden duty to speak, and I've done it!  And if you think you
are doing your duty by the child--let alone his mother----"

She broke off, for the Captain bounced in his chair, and dashed down
the newspaper.

"Haven't I told you I won't have poor Milly's name dragged into these
discussions!  She's dead!--and so let her be!"

If a lady can be said to snort, Mrs. Breagh gave utterance to a sound
of that nature.

"I'm willing, Alexander, I'm sure!  But all things considered, I must
say I think it's a pity her ladyship died and left you a widower!"

"And you're right there, begad you are!  And how many times have I
told you she was merely an Honorable, and not her ladyship!"  He left
the newspaper sprawling on the hearthrug, and mechanically reaching
down his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the corner of the mantelshelf,
proceeded to fill the well-browned meerschaum, and when his wife
lighted a spill and held it to him as an olive-branch, he thanked her
in an absent way.  What did the Captain see as he pulled at the
gnawed, amber mouthpiece and stared into the red-hot heart of the
fire, communing with that other self that dwells within every man?




II

I think he saw young Alex Breagh, a junior Lieutenant of the
Grenadier company of the Royal Ennis Regiment of Infantry, winning
his spurs of manhood under Gough and Hardinge and Gilbert on the
plain beside the Sutlej, where stands Ferozshahr.

"For I don't pretend to be a hero or anything of that sort, but I've
never shirked my share of fighting," said the silent voice within
him, and the Captain exhaled a spirt of smoke and mumbled: "I believe
you!"  And the other Breagh went on:

"Fair play and no favor won us our honors, mind you! though the
chance didn't come until later on.  True, we helped Sir Harry Smith
to pound the Sikhs at Ferozshahr and at Aliwal, when the cavalry of
his Right had driven the Khâlsas back across the Red Ford.  Waiting
for the elephants with the heavy siege-guns and the ammunition and
stores to come up from Delhi, took a hell of a time.  Seven long
weeks of broiling by day and freezing o' nights, while Tij Sinh and
his thirty-five thousand Khâlsas entrenched themselves, mounted their
heavy artillery--made their bridge of boats, and encamped their
cavalry up the river.  But the day came--our day!--and I don't forget
that foggy tenth of February while I'm breathing."

Captain Breagh sucked at his pipe and reflectively pulled a whisker.
And the silent voice went on:

"We were with the Left Division under General Dick, and led the
assault, while Gilbert and Smith feigned to attack on the enemy's
left and center.  And in that charge,--when the General got his
death-wound from a swivel-ball,--I was the second red-coat to cross
the ditch, and scramble over the big mud rampart, and saber a Sikh
gunner with his linstock in his hand!..."

Mrs. Breagh, chagrined at remaining so long the object of her
husband's inattention, picked up his fallen newspaper and almost
timidly laid it on his knee.  And the child under the table kept as
quiet as a mouse, almost...

"Thank ye, my dear!" said the Captain, while the other Breagh went on:

"And when the Treaty was signed and the rumpus all over--for the
time!--because Dalhousie's bungling brought the hornets about our
ears again!--we marched from Lahore to Calcutta with Britain's
victorious army--barring the force we'd left with Lawrence at Mian
Mir."

The silence continuing, Mrs. Breagh drew her work-table toward her,
and began to look over a basket of little toeless and heel-less
stockings.  As she did this she sighed.  The Captain smoked
thoughtfully.  And the inward voice went on:

"The Governor-General and his staff rode with Sir Harry Smith and the
Advance--and between the Cavalry Brigade that came after 'em--for Sir
Harry swore he'd be damned but since we'd seen the hottest of the
fighting, we should have the post of honor!--between the Cavalry and
Ours came the spoils of war, drawn by the Government elephants--two
hundred and fifty Sikh guns we'd taken at Sobraon.  Hah!"

The Captain's eyes were fixed on the fire.  He smoked in quick, short
puffs.

"Standards waving, bands blowing their heads off, and a bit o' loot
in most men's knapsacks.  Glory for the dead, and praise and
promotion for the living--begad! it was worth while--just then!--to
be a British soldier!  And I'd been wounded just enough to look
interesting, and got a Special Mention in Despatches--and the women
were pulling caps for me,--devil a lie in that!  And I danced with
Milly at the Welcome Back Ball at Government House, in March, 1846.
And whether it was Fate--or that way she had of looking up under her
eyelashes, and showing a laughing mouth full of tiny pearly-white
teeth over the top of her fan, I've never been quite clear.  But even
before the steward introduced Lieutenant Breagh to the Hon. Millicent
Fermeroy, I'd fallen head over ears in love with Milly, and she was
as mad for me!"

Still silence reigned in the room, only broken by the cinders falling
on the hearth, and the breathing of three people.  Mrs. Breagh still
bent over her basket of little worn socks, of which those in most
crying need of darning belonged to Carolan.  Her lips were tightly
closed, but as the man within her husband talked to the man, the
woman within the woman talked to his wife.

"I wonder whether he knows I know he's thinking of her again?  I
wonder whether she'd have liked to sit and toil and moil for a child
of mine, and know that the other woman held the first place in his
heart?  Ah, dear me!"

She glanced at her husband.  He did not see her.  He was living in
the Past.

"Nobody noticed how often we danced together....  It had gone pretty
far with us before Her Ladyship scented what was in the wind, and
sent an _aide-de-camp_ to remind Miss Fermeroy that the doctor had
set down his foot against her overheating herself with waltzing,--and
I found myself staring after her with her bouquet in my hand....  And
I took it home to quarters--and I've got it now, stowed away with her
letters and a lot of other things in a tin uniform-case....  Fanny
hasn't an idea of that!"

The smoke-puffs came more slowly, and the darning-needle now worked
busily.  The voice of a sergeant who was drilling a squad of recruits
came in gruff barks from the Parade.

"The Fermeroys were great folks....  Colonel Lord Augustus
Fermeroy--Milly's uncle, was a tremendous Light Cavalry swell on the
Commander-in-Chief's Staff.  Of course, I knew that he would never
hear of an engagement between his brother's orphan daughter--(to do
the old man justice, he loved her as his own!)--and a Lieutenant of a
marching regiment of infantry who'd nothing but his pay.  So--as
Milly and me had made up our minds we couldn't live without each
other,--we were married secretly--first at a Protestant Mission
Church, and then by a French Franciscan _padre_--and _he_ made bones
about splicing us--because I wasn't a Catholic,--and if I hadn't told
a white lie or two about my intention of turning Papist, I don't
believe he'd have tied the knot.  But all's fair in love!--and we
were in love with a vengeance.  I suppose I was a selfish beggar to
coax Milly into deceiving her people, but----"

A long ray of chilly January sunshine, full of dancing dust-motes,
came in at the window.  Mrs. Breagh sneezed as it fell across her
face.

"A time came when I knew I had been as selfish as she never would
have called me.  People had to be told!--so we enlightened 'em by
shooting the moon.  The condition of my war-chest wasn't over and
above flourishing, but I got a month's leave for the Mofussil and
secured a twenty-rupee furnished bungalow at Titteghur--and next
morning--before the hue and cry had well begun, Lady Augustus got a
_chit_ from Milly by _harkára_--I remember every word of it.
'_Dearest Aunt,--I hope you have not been alarmed, supposing me to
have been murdered or carried off by wicked persons.  I am safe and
happy with my own dear husband, from whom, I shall never be parted
now._'"

The pipe was nearly smoked out, but the Captain did not appear aware
of that.

"'_Never be parted_,' and before three months were over our heads..."

Clash!  Mrs. Breagh had let her scissors fall.  Her husband made a
long arm, picked them up, and gave them back to her.

"Thank you, Alex, love!" said Mrs. Breagh effusively.  But he went on
sucking at the now empty pipe, and staring at the waning fire.  And
the silent voice went on:

"The Fermeroys were furious.  But there was no use in making a fuss
and a scandal, and I must say they took the blow awfully well.  Good
haters both--declared that under no conceivable circumstances would
they ever admit within their doors an officer who had acted so
dishonorably, but they'd receive Milly whenever she liked to come.
Nor would they--though her uncle was her guardian and
trustee--deprive her of her fortune--seven thousand pounds in East
India Stock, Home Rails, and Government Three Per Cents.  But they
tied it up tight for the benefit of the child that was coming, and
others that might come--in what they called a Post-Matrimonial
Settlement, and I was agreeable; though, mind you!--I had the law on
my side if I'd chosen to make a fuss.  And I was too much in love to
bother over money--or to care a cowrie about being cut by the
Fermeroys' friends."

Nothing but gray ashes remained in the pipe-bowl.

"I don't know whether it wasn't to get me out of the way that the
regiment was ordered to Sikandarabad.  There'd been a Sepoy rising at
Haidarabad, six miles north of the Subsidiary Force's
cantonments--and as the big Mussulman city was swarming with all the
blackguards and _budmashes_ in the Dekkan--and bazar-_gup_ had it
that another Rohilla riot was threatening--Ours got the route to go.
And Milly--God bless her! wouldn't hear of being left behind.  And we
steamed down coast to Masulipatam, and marched the two hundred miles;
and though it was early in January, the roads were confoundedly
squashy and the heat was like a vapor-bath--there being no winter to
speak of in the South."

"He's in a regular brown study," said her unseen gossip and
confidante to the Captain's second wife.  "Perhaps his tailor has
been dunning him, or he's been losing at cards.  When men are out of
spirits, money's generally at the bottom of it!  Better get him to
tell what's the matter by-and-by--not now!"

"And the long road ran like a brown snake between mangrove-swamps and
paddy-fields, where it wasn't coffee-plantations and cotton-ground.
And there were black-buck and partridge for the shooting when you
could get away from the columns; and duck and snipe when we were hung
up at the river-fords waiting for the elephants that were to take
over the baggage and guns."

The shouts of the drill-sergeant came more faintly from the
Parade-ground.  The Captain seemed to doze as he sucked at the empty
pipe, but Memory's voice went on:

"The women and children of the rank and file were carried on the
baggage-wagons, and the officers' wives traveled by bullock-_tonga_
or _palki-dak_, under an escort of good-conduct men of the Subsidiary
Force the Brigadier had sent down from cantonments.  Milly laughed at
their oilskin-covered wickerwork chimney-pot hats and little old red
coatees, and black unmentionables and bare sandaled feet.  But they
couldn't keep the beggars of bearers from turning out of the road and
taking short-cuts through jungle-paths.  Then they'd dump the
_palkis_ down in the shade, and light a fire of sticks, and squat
round and smoke their hubble-bubbles or chew betel....  And Milly's
blackguards had gone out of sight behind some trees, and she was
scared at finding herself alone and unprotected.  And she tried to be
calm and plucky, thinking of--what she and me were looking for....
But something trotted out of a cane-brake and snuffed at the _palki_
curtains--and she went off in a dead faint and small blame to her!
For there were the prints of a full-grown tiger's pugs in the soft
ground round the palanquin--and the place where his hind-claws had
torn up the grass when he bounded off...."

The forgotten pipe was upside down in the smoker's mouth now.  A
pinch of ashes had fallen upon the breast of the unhooked scarlet
coat.

"When I came up I made those coolie-brutes eat plenty stick.  But
Milly--poor girl! had got her death-blow.  And the boy was born that
night under canvas by the roadside.  An old Murderer--Surgeon-Major
Murdoch of Ours--did all man could do to save her.  But--just at
dawn--with the eastern sky all lemon-yellow and pink and madder
behind a mango-tope, with a Hindu temple near it, and a clump of mud
huts--and some old saint's shrine under a sacred peepul-tree--the boy
was born and the mother went out like a blown waxlight.  Oh, my
darling! ... And the Catholic chaplain--who'd been fetched to give
Milly the Last Sacraments--baptized the boy, for Milly had made me
swear all the children should be of her faith.  And the boy would
have died, too, but that my company Sergeant's wife--she that is
nurse to my youngest child to-day--happened to be able and willing to
suckle him.  And we struck camp and set out on the last march,
carrying a corpse and a new-born baby.  And that night we buried my
girl by torchlight in the cemetery belonging to the European
infantry-barracks.  And it's six years ago to-day--and here I am
married to another woman!  Are you happy with her, Alex Breagh?
She's as unlike the other as chalk's different from cheese--and poor
Milly 'ud have called her a vulgar person!  I know she would!  And
yet--Milly never gave me a decent meal, and the servants did as they
liked! and Fanny's a rare housekeeper.  I've been more comfortable
since I married her than I ever was in my life before.  Yes, I'm a
happy man!..."

He told himself this continually.  And yet the knowledge of material
comfort could not long silence the crying of his heart.

He took the smoked-out pipe from his mouth, and turned to look at the
plump, high-colored, personable woman who was sitting darning his
children's stockings with his wedding-ring shining on her finger, and
the present had its value for him, and he ceased to company with the
dead.  His regard, at first chill and gloomy, warmed: his
good-humored smile curled his full red lips again....

"Why, how you look, love!" said Mrs. Breagh, and she rose and came to
his side.  Then she sat on his knee and smoothed his hair from his
forehead.  And the Captain returned her kiss, and told himself that
true wisdom lay in making the best of one's luck generally, and being
grateful for whatever good the gods chose to grant.

"No use crying over spilt milk! ... Beg pardon, my dear!--but what
were you asking me?"

"I was asking--supposing Carolan had never been born--or had
died--whether you would have come into his mother's money?"

"Would I have inherited Milly's seven thousand pounds?  Not a
halfpenny of it, my dear!  In the event of her decease without issue
it would have gone back to her family.  And even during Milly's
lifetime she only had the half-yearly interest.  Couldn't sell out
stock, or raise a lump sum for--ahem!--for the benefit of any person
she'd a mind to help.  And husband and wife are one flesh, so the
Bible tells you!"

"The poor thing that's gone ought to have had more spirit than to let
you be treated so!" said the second wife, who had possessed no
fortune beyond a hundred pounds or so, bestowed as dowry on his
younger daughter by the hard-worked apothecary of an English country
town; and was conscious that in marrying her the Captain had not
aspired to a union above his social rank.

"Begad! my dear!  I don't mind owning that Lord Augustus hated me,
from the top hair of my head to the last peg in my boot-sole.
And--when he died--and he did go over to the majority not long after
the Fermeroys had sailed for England with Lord Hardinge--when he died
it didn't make a pin's difference, for under that settlement I've
told you of, the co-trustee, a solicitor--Mr. Mustey, of Furnival's
Inn, Holborn, London--took his son,--who'd been made partner in his
business--as his partner in the trusteeship.  And, of course, the
money's the boy's!--though the two-hundred-and-twenty-odd annual
interest is paid to me--the whole of it!--until Carry's old enough to
go to school and college--and when he reaches twenty-three the whole
lump of the principal will be his--seven thousand golden
sovereigns--to play ducks and drakes with if he likes!"

"And my poor darlings will have nothing," Mrs. Breagh bleated,
"unless,---because I've treated Carolan in all respects--and
more!--as if he were my own child, and that I would declare with my
head upon my dying pillow!--unless he has the gratitude and the
decent feeling to do something for Alan,--if it's only giving him a
few hundreds to start him properly in life...."

"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," advised her lord.
"My dear, if you'll get me the materials from the sideboard, I'll wet
my whistle.  Talking's dry work!"

With wifely compliance Mrs. Breagh placed the whisky-decanter and the
Delhi clay-bottle of drinking-water near her Alexander's elbow.  You
are to imagine the Captain mixing a jorum on half-and-half
principles, nodding to his Fanny, and taking a refreshing swig of the
cooling draft.  And at this juncture a head of scarlet curls was
poked out from the covert of the Indian shawl tablecloth, and the
clear treble of his eldest son piped out:

"Dada, how much money is seven fousand golding sovereigns?  And how
long will it be before I get them to make ducks and drakes?"




III

You are to suppose Captain Breagh, startled by the unexpected
apparition of his eldest son, swallowing the whole jorum of whisky
and water at a gulp, and his wife dropping her darning into her lap
with the very exclamation Carolan had previously promised himself.
Still as a mouse, he had lain in ambush beneath the Pembroke table,
with the portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a gray charger in the
foreground of the highly varnished oil-painting--representing the
Royal Ennis Regiment in the performance of prodigies of gallantry in
conflict with the French at Vimiera--staring with bolting blue eyes,
and pointing at him with a Field-Marshal's _bâton_ whenever he had
peeped out.

Now, conscious of having made an impression, and with a curious
mixture of sensations, emotions, impulses, fermenting in a brain of
six years, the boy stood upright before his elders, his well-knit
shoulders thrown back, his sturdy legs, arrayed in their virile
coverings of blue cloth adorned with cat-stitches of yellow
basting-thread, planted wide apart upon the tiger-skin hearthrug, and
his stomach thrust forward with the arrogance characteristic of the
newly made capitalist.

"Why the devil were you hiding there?  Eh, you young Turk, you?"
blustered the Captain.

"Eavesdroppers," said Mrs. Breagh acidly, "never go to Heaven."

"Farver Haygarty----" Carolan began.

"We don't want to know what Father Haygarty says!" snapped Mrs.
Breagh, whose Protestant gorge rose at the Papistical teachings of
the regimental chaplain.  And then she remembered that in a few years
the worldly prospects of her three children might depend on the
good-will of this chubby-faced, red-haired urchin who stood silently
before her, contemplating her with a new expression in a very round
pair of oddly amber-flecked gray eyes.  And being a weak,
ill-balanced, underbred woman, and a mother into the bargain, she
truckled, as such women will, to the latent potentialities vested in
the stubborn wearer of the unfinished suit of clothes.

"Not but what Father Haygarty is a good man and much respected--and I
dare say you're sorry for having kicked poor Josey.  So, since it's
your birthday we won't say any more about it--and Nurse shall pull
out those basting-threads and sew on the brace-buttons when you're in
bed to-night----"

"There! you hear!  Stop, you young rascal!  Come back and kiss your
mother, and thank her, and run away to Mrs. Povah!" bade the Captain,
for Carolan, driving a pair of grubby fists deep into the pockets of
the new breeches, had swung contemptuously upon his heel, and made
for the door.

"She's not my muvver!" said the son, pausing in his struggle with the
door-handle to turn a flushed and frowning face upon his sire.  "She
said so just now and so did you!"

"Then shut the door!" thundered the Captain, but it had slammed
before the words were fairly out.  And Carolan stamped across the
landing whistling defiantly, and burst into the nursery, where
Baba--for the moment its sole occupant--was asleep in her bassinette,
Alan and Monica having gone out to walk with Miss Josey, and Nurse
being busy in the adjoining room.

Carolan's head was hot, and his heart felt big and swollen.  He was a
person of consequence, and at the same time a thing of no account.
Thus the pride that flamed in his gray eyes was presently quenched by
scalding salt drops of resentful indignation.  He was sorrowful,
elated, angry, and complacent, all at once, as he stood by Baba's
crib.

He had never until now suspected Mrs. Breagh was not his mother.  He
had called her "Mamma" ever since he could speak.  No question had
ever risen in his mind as to the existence of some secret reason for
her dislike of him.

When she had seemed most hateful in his eyes, by reason of her
lacking reticence and absent sense of honor--for she couldn't keep a
secret if she promised you ever so, and was always telling tales of
you to Dada!--Carolan had frequently relieved his feelings by going
into corners and calling her "that woman" under his breath.  The
appalling sense of crime, involved with the relief this process
brought--for to call your real mother names would be a sin of the
first magnitude--bad invested it with a dreadful fascination.  Now
the glamour had vanished, together with the wickedness.  Mrs. Breagh
was nothing to Carolan.  He was the son of another woman--and she was
dead in India.  Her name was Milly--a gentle, prettily sounding name.

Only the day before, Carolan had found out what the thing grown-up
people called "death" and "dying" meant.  He had given a shiny
sixpence that had lain hidden for weeks at the bottom of the pocket
in his old plaid frock to Bugler Finnerty for a thrush he had limed,
a beautiful brown thrush with a splendidly dappled breast.  Only the
bird's eyes looked like beads of dull jet glass instead of round
black blobs of diamond-bright bramble-dew.  And it had squatted on
the foul floor of the little wood and wire cage in which Finnerty had
been keeping it, panting, with ruffled feathers and open beak.


Finnerty had said that the bird would thrive on snails and worms, and
Carolan had promised it plenty of these luxuries.  He had meant to
range for them through all the soldiers' vegetable-allotments, and
ransack the Parade-ground flower-beds.  But all at once the thrush
had fallen over on its side, fluttering and struggling--and Carolan
had been so sorry for it that he had thrust his pudgy hand into the
cage, and taken the poor sufferer out with the intention of nursing
it in his pinafore for a little, and then letting it go free, since
it was so unhappy in captivity.

But when he had bidden it fly away it had had no strength to do so.
It had lain helpless in his hands, and the strange quivering thrills
that had passed through its slender body had communicated themselves
to the child.  Something was taking place--some change was coming.
Without previous knowledge he had been sure of that.

And the change had come, with the drawing of the thin gray membrane
from the corners next the beak, over the round yellow-rimmed eyes.
Then the upper and underlids had sealed themselves over the veiled
eyeballs--the quick panting had changed to long gasps, the head had
rolled to one side helplessly--and with a long shuddering convulsion
the thing had taken place.  The slender body had stiffened in
Carolan's hand, the glossy wings had closed down tightly against its
dappled sides, its scaly legs had stretched out rigidly and not been
drawn back again.  And a voice that seemed to speak inside Carolan
had said to him: "This is death!"


Now broke in upon his immature brain a flash of blinding brilliancy.
Milly, who had been his mother, was dead, like the thrush.  He shut
his eyes, and saw her lying, very pale and pretty and helpless, with
ruffled brown hair the exact color of the bird's feathers, and
beautiful brown eyes--why was he so certain that they had been
brown?--all dim and filmy, and her slender body and long graceful
limbs now quivering and convulsed, and now growing rigid and stiff.
And a lump rose in his throat, and a tear splashed on the front of
the brand-new blue jacket, and another that would have fallen was
dried by a glow of inspiration.  For he had dug a grave with a sherd
of broken flower-pot in the angle of one of the official flower-beds
that decorated the oblong patch of lawn before the Mess House, and
buried the dead thrush in the shelter of a clump of daffodils, and
said a "Hail Mary!" for it, because, though Miss Josey and Mrs.
Breagh--whom he would never call "Mamma" again!--termed it a Popish
practice,--Father Haygarty said that one ought to pray for the
dead....

Surely one ought to pray for the soul of Milly.  She would
understand, it was to be hoped! why one had never done it before.
Somebody would tell her Carolan hadn't known!  Poor, poor Milly!  He
wished he had been there with his new tin sword when that snuffing
Thing came out of the jungle and frightened her so that she had
died....

He looked about the nursery.  There stood Monica's Indian-cane cot,
and Alan's green-painted iron crib on either side of Nurse's wooden
four-poster.  At the bed-head above Nurse's pillow was nailed a
little plaster Calvary, and a miniature holy-water stoup, and over
Carolan's little folding camp-bedstead hung a noble crucifix of ebony
and carved ivory, so large and so massive that two iron staples held
it in its place.

The Face of the pendent, tortured Figure--there was death in that
also.  It seemed to the child that the breast beneath the drooped,
thorn-encircled Head, heaved with long sighs, that the lips gasped
for breath--that long shuddering spasms rippled through the tortured
Body, bringing home, as nothing ever had before, the meaning of the
lines that the boy had learned as a parrot might....

"_He was crucified also for us ... suffered ... and was buried...._"

And that was why we prayed to Him for the dead and buried people,
because He had suffered death and gone down into the dark grave, and
He knew how to help souls....  Carolan nailed his resolution to say a
nightly "Our Father" for poor Milly to the masthead of determination,
unaware that Father Haygarty had incurred the displeasure of Mrs.
Breagh by urging the necessary discharge of this filial duty as a
reason why the boy should be told about his mother who was dead.

We may guess that the influence of the second wife had inspired the
Captain to insist that the hour of enlightenment should be deferred
indefinitely.  And if any one had suggested to Mrs..  Breagh that she
had been prompted by a belated jealousy of her predecessor, she would
have been genuinely horrified at the idea.

Nurse came in as Carolan decided on his course of future loyalty, and
started at the sight of the sturdy little figure standing, with legs
planted wide apart, on the shabby nursery drugget, its childish brows
puckered with profound thought.

"Now may the Saints stand between you and the mischief I know you're
plannin'!" said Nurse, who prided herself on reading thoughts in
faces.  "Is ut playin' acreybats on the windy-sill, or shavin' wid
the Captain's razor?  Spake ut out!"

Carolan spoke.

"Mamma is not my muvver, an' I shall call her Mrs. Breagh _always_!"

"God be good to me!" said Nurse, quite pale, and putting her hand to
her side.  "An' who tould ye that, an' set the two eyes of ye blazin'
like coals of fire?"

"You saided it!--and she saided it--and Dada saided it--when I was
playin' robber's cave under the sittin'-woom table," Carolan
proclaimed.  "And I'm goin' to pray for Milly--that's my weal
muvver--because she's dead--even if they say I shan't!"

"There'll none durst," said Nurse rather awfully, "wid Bridget Povah
to the fore!  And what else?"

Slightly damped by the prospect of being permitted to carry out his
shining new intention without interruption, Carolan reflected.

"Nuffing," he said at last, "'cept that I want to know how much is
seven fousand golding sovereigns?  For I am going to have them when I
grow up."

"Sure!" said Nurse, slightly bewildered, "a sovereign is the same as
a wan-pound note!  Ye have seen thim things, have ye not?"

Carolan had seen the soiled rags of Bank paper changing hands on
market-days, and the recollection wrinkled his nose.

"'Tis quare talk ye have," said Nurse, "about the sivin thousand
wan-pound notes.  'Tis a little haystack av them ye would be gettin'
from the gintleman at the Bank.  Where arr ye goin' now, ye onaisy
wandherer?  Wid your hoop for a rowl in the Barrack-square?  Take
your cap--an' remember that wheniver ye're clane out av sight, Biddy
Povah has her eye on you!"

But Carolan was already out of the room and half-way down the stairs.


Outside under the blue sky, with its flocks of fleecy white clouds
all hurrying southward, it was easy to forget the things that had
hurt.  The crackle of the sandy gravel underfoot, the purr of the
iron hoop in the metal driving-hook soothed and stimulated; the
ringing clatter when one got upon the cobblestones, and the echo when
one came under the archway of the Barrack-gate--were familiar,
pleasant things.

Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated--for at all
times and seasons of the year a nipping wind howled through the stony
tunnel that ended in the arch of the Barrack-gateway--and pacing his
official strip of pavement, that began at the yellow-painted
sentry-box with the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big
spiked gate.  And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned
privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings sprawling
on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers, and the sergeant sitting on
his cot stiffly stocked and fully accoutered--that had the charm of a
well-known, never too familiar sight.  To other senses besides the
eyes and ears appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and
ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched blue gingham
umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank mounted on two barrels,
against the great bare wall on the left of the Barrack-entrance,
exercising a privilege permitted to no other, because Mary's stone
ginger-pop bottles might be relied upon as containing nothing else....


It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place, bordered by a
line of shops and houses, broken by the bridge, under which flowed a
famous salmon-river, was seething with people out to buy and sell and
enjoy themselves.  On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a
modern building of no great design, animated bundles of rags
containing female penitents performing the devotions of the Stations
round it.  While upreared upon the summit of an isolated rock beyond
the rushing river, perched the ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient
castle from which the town derived its name; once held against the
Commonwealth by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet bedded
in the massive masonry.

The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about blared on
the ear from a field where some caravans of strolling show-people had
encamped themselves.  Rows of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down,
waited their squireen owners in the bleakest angle of the
market-place; and in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them,
covered with gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and
buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had jolted and
joggled from their distant homes, and--the last bargain made--would
jolt and joggle back again.

Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese, butter,
and other dairy-produce.  Crates were crammed with quacking ducks and
loudly cackling fowls.  Strings of shaggy-footed horses and knots of
isolated cows were ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be
purchaser; hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the
staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive mood, alive
and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig.  In reeking basements
below the shops--cellars where potatoes, cabbages, and onions were
peddled to the poorest, and turf and firewood were sold in
ha'p'orths--piles of pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted
herring in popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted
handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to be frizzled
over turf-embers for supper.

A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a clarionet on a
square of smooth flagstones in the middle of the market-place.
And--for this was the West of Ireland in the early fifties--the
bright red or dark blue cloaks and white frilled caps of the matrons,
the short stuff petticoats, chintz jacket-bodices and bright
handkerchief-shawls of the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches,
blue yarn stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed
gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed
chimney-pots--gave charm and variety to the shifting scene.

Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse, strapping,
red-faced women who daily patroled the square in the neighborhood of
the Barracks; whisky-hardened viragoes whose uncovered heads of
greasy hair, thrust into sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and
uniform attire of clean starched cotton print, worn over a
multiplicity of whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,--as did their
coarse speech and loud laughter,--members of the ancient sisterhood
of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient profession in the
world.

Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers of the
greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of captive red-coats.
One of them was fairly sober, and sulky at being thus paraded under
the eyes of his countrymen.  The other, a raw young recruit,
half-fuddled with libations of porter and whisky, staggeringly
promenaded the pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in
the pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic comment
from the crowd into shaking off the women who supported,--while they
feigned to lean on him,--and challenging the critic of morals, in
broad Yorkshire, to a bout at fisticuffs.

"Leggo o' me, tha----!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians.  "Cannowt a
chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an' armin' him?  As for
tha!"--he addressed the critic--"Ah'll teach tha to meddle wi' thy
betters.  If tha'rt a mon--coom on!"

"Fight, is ut?  Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a fist wud level
ye," commented the censor, turning on his heel contemptuously.  Upon
which, the belligerent, taking the act as a confession of recreancy,
wrenched himself from the women, and, staggering forward, came into
violent contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the
result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed to tempt
customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk, or rolled gaily
down the gutter; pursued with yells of joy by certain ragged urchins
who usually were to be found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.

Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the upset and the
subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions on the soldier's
drunken clumsiness and the predatory activity of the raiders, shook
her fists at their flying heels.

"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha!  Wull sixpence neet maak guid thy
loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman, thrusting a hand into his
trousers-pocket in search of the coin.  Then his flaming face
darkened heavily, and he said, withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah
havena a brass farden t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence.
Mak't oop to her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"

And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her arm in the
soldier's and affectionately ogling him:

"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and a kiss av
the handsome boy you are will pay me!"

Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive sense of things
that are incomprehensible, saw with a strange shock and thrill that
never quite passed away.

The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump clean fingers
with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings on them was dashed to
the flags by a fierce blow of the old, bony, wrinkled hand....

"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said sternly to the
staring woman, "and thrapse upon your way!"

And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the faces in the
crowded market-place seemed to be looking that way, the woman had
picked up the coin; and as her comrades hurried on, had slunk after
them, leaving the tipsy soldier standing there.

"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him, "that ye are hastin'
quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid Thim Wans?"

And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that might have
meant anything, and hung his head sulkily, and gone staggering upon
his way, but in an opposite direction to that taken by the women.
And Mary Daa looked after him long and sorrowfully.

"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the apple-woman, for
Mary and he had struck up a friendship over divers ha'p'orths of nuts
and pink peppermint-candy sticks, "what are they, and why are they
wicked?"

Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel of her huge and
venerable bonnet, and became aware of a small boy with a scarlet
topknot and a pair of honest gray eyes.

"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were shining drops
of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the cracked glasses of her huge
iron-framed spectacles were foggy.  She took them off, and wiped them
on her old green plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been
referring to Thim Wans.

"What arr they?  Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous planets;
thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate up the bodies an' souls
av men!  Look me in the face wid your child's eyes, ye that will be a
man wan day, an' get by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you!  An'
when the pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon
your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av you--kape them
worruds in mind!"

Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny, purchased a
cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock, and went home crunching.  He had
learned a good deal that day.  The mystery of Death and the power of
Money had been revealed to him.  Also, he had gained some slight
preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against the human
soul in its march through this strange world of ours, and of the
strange and foul and ugly things that lie hidden beneath the shining
surface of Life.




IV

Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty or
rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of railed-in grass
plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns make a show of putting
forth green leaves in Spring, and plane-trees shed their bark, as
boa-constrictors doff their skins, at the approach of
Winter--Furnival's Inn, even in the year of stress of 1870, impressed
itself upon the casual visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a
dusty one in dry.  But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work
of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said that nothing
young or gay or natural could ever flourish there.

At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily fraught with Fate
for the protagonist of this unpretending life-drama, recent puddles
testified to overnight's rain, and gray clouds rushing north-westward
across a monochromatic parallelogram of sky, framed in by the
bilious-hued, grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings,
predicted more presently.

Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have seen a shaggy
young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under the round-topped carriage
archway, eschewing the smaller side-entrance intended for
pedestrians.  Whereat the upper half of a porter, crowned with a
tarred chimney-pot hat, and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt
buttons, appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the
fresh-faced, shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and
well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his back,
as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived between the gouty
Corinthian columns of the fourth portico on the left-hand side, and
rang the first-floor bell.

"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized, noting the
masterful tug given by the early visitor to the dingy brass
bell-handle--third of a row of six sticking out like organ-stops on
the right of the heavy, low-browed outer door.  "And again! ... Don't
be shy!" said the porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the
bell-wire, and then you won't have done no good to
yourself!--supposing you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and
Son--though you're over-young to be the first and over-cheerful to be
the second, it strikes me!  Good-day, Mr. Chown!"  And the porter
touched his hat to a lean, mild-looking, elderly man in black, who
turned in at that moment beneath the smaller archway.  "You're not
the first this morning, early as you are.  There's a young chap who
don't seem in the mind to take no answer--has been ringing ten
minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."

"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so early!" said the
person addressed.

A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between Mr. Chown
and the porter, but there were no further words.  Mr. Chown passed
on, and joined the younger man on the doorstep under the fourth
portico on the left side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's
prophecy about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his
umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal appearance, and
drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of his vest:

"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with Mr. Mustey
Junior,"--he tapped the key upon the tarnished brass door-handle as
though to knock some grains of dust out of the words, and went on,
punctuating his utterances with more tapping--"I happen to
know"--_tap-tap-tap_--"that he won't be here to-day."  He added, as
he took a brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy,
square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight (with
a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of the shoulders, and
the depth of the chest), buttoned up in the rough frieze garment that
had seen hard wear.  "But possibly it is the head of the Firm"
(_tap-tap_) "you want, and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid
you'll have to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late
at work yesterday.  I should mention that I am employed in the
capacity of head-clerk by" (_tap_) "a firm of solicitors who have
offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath Mustey and Son"
(_tap_), "and----"

Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the lowest of a
series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking the right-hand
row of bells, and setting forth the titles of "Wotherspoon and
Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners of Oaths."  He continued: "And
though I was detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I
noticed particularly--when I shut the front-door behind me, that the
gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was burning still."

"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the strange young
man, whose head was plentifully covered with a crop of decidedly red
and obstinately curly hair, crowned with the battered gray felt
wideawake previously mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured,
fresh-colored, rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of
very clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked
with yellow.  He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he carried two
dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor, and Messrs.
Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with an irrepressible start of
consternation, saw that the darkness of the room behind them was
thrown into relief by a greenish patch of radiance that indicated the
position of a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge
hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle of the
elder Mustey's private room.

"God bless my soul, so it is!"

The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped
backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the
same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient
buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the
window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown
wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it
on the door-knob.  Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a
perturbed and dubious air:

"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you--being a
stranger, as I take it?--and new to the sights of London--were to
indulge in a little walk along Holborn--say as far as Bloomsbury
Street--and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the
Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,--or the--the Mummies in the
Egyptian Department,--and then come back again,--you might stand a
better chance of getting the bell answered."  The speaker added,
meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the
pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it:
"Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."

"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell _is_ answered.  But
I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.

"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon
and Cadderby's head-clerk.

The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the
fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.

"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.

"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your
cradle!  But time flies and business presses, and----"

"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk
inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly
backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak
and hung with mildewed flock-paper.  "_Donnerwetter!_ how you smell
here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that
served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air.  "But I suppose
you're used to it!"

"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should
be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown,
who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty
floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door.  "But
I suppose--as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still
away on their vacations--the place might seem--to a stranger from the
country--a trifle close."

"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was
highly uncomplimentary.  "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty,
cellary.  With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that
I----"  He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's
gunpowder!  The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt
gunpowder....  Here!  Hallo!  What the devil are you trying to do?
What do you mean?"

For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion to the
sallow change of countenance previously observed in him, had caught
him by the arm, as his eager foot had touched a dilapidated mat that
lay as a snare for the unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted
staircase, and with unexpected strength and quickness had swung him
to the hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the threshold.

"I mean----"  Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently quite unused
to wrestling: and as he strove with the shaggy young man upon the
threshold of the dingy hall, it was evident that he would very soon
give in.  "I mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be
sensible?"

"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding something.
Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not at all malevolently, "or
I shall have to hurt you!  I'm going upstairs, and you can't stop me!
What harm do you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man
who's lying fast asleep across his table?  I shan't go in without
knocking, if that's what you're thinking of!  And what harm do you
suppose he's going to do to me?"

A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out a wary hand
behind his own respectable back, and grabbed at the dim brass knob
and slammed the heavy door upon himself and his antagonist.  There
were circles round his eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.

"You young--_puff_--idiot!" he gasped, "I'm
not--_whoof!_--considering you--for--a--_whuff!_--moment.  It's
him,"--he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped his face--"him
that I've known since I was first articled, and had many a kindly
word from, and many a liberal present.  And now that this has
happened--I may say I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed
here--knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a time I've
been on the point of going up and knocking and offering a word of
sympathy.  But--it wasn't to be done!  ... You could never take a
liberty with him, alive--and no one shall if I can stop 'em--now that
he isn't!"

"Now that he--why, man!--you don't mean to say----"

They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the shaggy, obstinate
young man had now flushed to ripe tomato-color as he stammered:

"You don't mean he's dead?  It isn't possible!"

"I say nothing and I mean nothing.  There's no third party present,"
asserted Mr. Chown, with professional caution, "to testify to what I
said or didn't say.  But his son has to be looked for, and brought
here if they can find him--and if Mr. William can't be found--and
without prejudice I think that's more than likely!--some one he knew
and trusted must be the first to go into that room.  His housekeeper
I've heard is a good creature.  He's often dropped a word in praise
of her to me, I know....  We'll telegraph--I know his address!
Number Three----"

The young man interrupted: "Addington Square, Camberwell."

"Send her a wire!  I'll pay!"  Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his
waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger.  "There's
a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"

"Where is Snow Hill?  I'm a stranger in London.  As it happens, I
came from Schwärz-Brettingen--it's a University town in North
Germany--to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son."
The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows....
adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's
fortune--his son, who you say's missing, is the other--that is, he
has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine....  For I didn't
come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my
twenty-third birthday.  And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"

"I see!  He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord!  Good
Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!--what a world it
is!"

"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may
be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man,
and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him
as unpleasantly powerful.  "Look here!--where is your key?"

"Just inside in the hall there....  I'd dropped it, don't you
remember--I was looking for it when you--when you--said you smelt
gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed
on me."

"You did on me!--and I thought you'd gone crazy.  Look here----" the
other began.

"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown,
adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add--I was
effective!  And if you've got it into your head that there's life in
the poor old man yet--put it out again!  For he shot himself last
night just on the stroke of nine--and I could take my oath of it!  I
heard what must have been the--the noise--as I passed out at the
gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the
neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.'  And I
thought it might have been thunder--for the weather observations in
the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and
South-Eastern England--and the winds have been blowing from south and
south-east.  And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the
atmosphere--and she has been bad three days past."

"But let's do something--not stand here with our hands in our
pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness.  "I'm a
surgeon--not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid
in such a case as you've hinted at."

"My key's inside the house--as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown,
"and unless we were to break down the door--which would bring the
police upon us before they're wanted--or one of us could climb like a
cat--so as to look in at that window and make certain----"

"_Donnerwetter_!  Good idea!" said the shaggy young man, in whose
conversation mingled interjectional scraps and snatches of a language
not comprehended by Mr. Chown, but dimly conjectured to be German.
In the same instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing
the unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it--had thrown it
upon the area-railings close to the row of bells that resembled
organ-stops, and mounted upon it, shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and
purposeful.  An iron torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days
when respectable citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen,
jutted from the wall immediately above his head.  He made a long arm
and grasped it--and to the dazzled observation of the head-clerk
appeared to walk up the wall like a housefly.  But in reality he had
wedged a toe in an ornamental border of sooty masonry of the
brick-in-and-brick-out description, that outlined the doors and
windows of the Inn buildings; and with a degree of skill and
suppleness that testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted
himself up.  Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of
getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow ledge of
stone running before those first-floor windows, and the head-clerk,
holding his breath, saw him stoop and peer in over a wire blind.

Directly afterward, as it seemed, he withdrew his head and looked
down into Mr. Chown's pale face, and his own had lost its ruddy
color.  Then, coming down as he had gone up, much to the astonishment
and curiosity of Mr. Chown's two juniors and several legal-looking
personages who had arrived upon the scene and gathered in quite a
little crowd upon the cobblestones--he said in a low tone, as he drew
the former gentleman apart:

"You were right.  Whether it was done last night or more recently, it
has been done, and thoroughly.  With a new-looking revolver.  He has
it in his hand!"

"Poor old gentleman, I could swear that what he did he has been
driven to do, through despair and debt and misery....  'Mr. William
will be my ruin, Chown!' he said to me only three days ago.  And he
has been his ruin, sir!" said Mr. Chown, blowing his nose with a
flourish, and wiping his eyes furtively.  "His ruin, Mr. William has
been....  You may depend upon that!"

Said the young man from North Germany, pulling on his shabby overcoat:

"The table is covered with papers, and the safe facing the window is
open....  Do you think----"

"I don't think--I know!  He had a kind of swooning fit a week back,
when the crash came, and a Receiving Order in Bankruptcy was made
against him on the petition of his creditors.  He was a long time
coming round--and I stayed by him while the caretaker went to fetch a
hackney-cab--for I'd been called, being a sort of favorite with him,
and having known him for years.  He'd been robbed and plundered then,
because he groaned it out to me; and he pointed to that safe, and
told me that it had been gutted by means of false keys--the Bramah he
always wore on his watch-riband having been got at and copied.  'All
the cash I had left in the world, Chown, besides seven thousand in
Trust Securities! ... It's my punishment for having been near and
hard to others that I might be generous to him!'  Are you going!"

The shaggy young man, crimson to the lining-edge of the old gray
wideawake he had pulled over his brows after buttoning his overcoat,
made an incoherent sound in his throat, and swung abruptly round upon
his heel.  The reflection had occurred to him: "He'd have been
generous to me if he'd waited to have seen me--and blown out my
brains before scattering his own; _pfui!_--over that table and all
the papers!"  But he did not voice it aloud.

"Leave me your address," said the kindly-hearted Mr. Chown,
"and--it's not business to say you may trust me!--but I'll undertake
to bring your name before the Official Receiver--for you're one of
the principal creditors--provided what you've told me can be
proved...."

"I suppose you know that--dead man's writing when you see it?" said
the other, swinging round on Mr. Chown with no very pleasant look.

"As well as I know my own!" retorted Mr. Chown, nodding back.

"If so--and not because I admit you've any right!--but because I
choose to show it you--you may read this!" went on the late Mr.
Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a rather worn and crumpled oblong
envelope out of his pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it
in a flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.

"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger Strasse,
Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I really shouldn't have
dreamed--" began Mr. Chown.

"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting it upon
him, and the head-clerk with another protest, nipped in mid-utterance
by another order to read it, mastered the contents.

The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's letter, and
begged to remind him that he was quite well acquainted with the terms
of his late mother's Marriage Settlement.  He congratulated his young
friend on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided
under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and appointed the
hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the 3d of January, to
discharge his trust and hand over the cash, deposit-notes, and
securities....

"While all the time he knew--none better, except his precious
partner!--that I should leave his office as poor as I'd come there.
It would have been decent," snarled Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have
owned the truth."

"And accused his own son!--And now I look at the date of this it was
written on the day before that affair of the false Bramah....  Do him
justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try to think he meant fair by you.  Wherever
he's gone..."  Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic
sky--now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest--and then
down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for that, and you'll be
the better here, I dare to say!  You'll give me your address, sir?  I
don't know but that as you were the first to discover the body,
you'll be expected to give evidence before the Coroner."

"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh.  "Whether he wants it or not I
haven't an address to give.  I paid my bill at a thundering beastly
cheap hotel in the Euston Road by handing over my trunks of clothes,
and books and instruments to the landlord....  He promised to keep
them for three weeks--to give me a chance to redeem them!--and he
grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough to buy his
bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were over his head.  And I
pawned my coat for dinner yesterday and a coffee-house bed last
night....  That's why you saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this
old wrap-rascal....  But I'll look in here again to-morrow--unless
I--change my mind!"

He had passed under the archway and was gone before Mr. Chown had
recovered himself sufficiently to call after him.  To follow would
have been no use.  So the head-clerk went sorrowfully back to write
and dispatch those urgent telegraphic messages.

And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of pedestrian
humanity rolling east and west along the worn pavements of Holborn,
plunged through the roaring traffic of the cobblestoned roadway, and
with his chin well down upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep
into his pockets, turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had
been heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden turn of
Fortune's wheel, a beggar.




V

As a dog will skulk dejectedly from the spot where a bone previously
buried has failed to reward the snuffing nose and the digging paw, so
P. C. Breagh, on the long-expected twenty-third birthday that was to
have made him master of dead Milly's fortune, slouched down Fetter
Lane, humming and vibrant with the vicinity of great printing-works,
and redolent of glue and treacle, tar, printers' ink, engine-oil, and
size.

A double stream of carts and trucks, heavily laden with five-mile
rollers of yellow-white paper for the revolving vertical
type-cylinders of the Applegarth steam printing-machine--then in its
heyday--bales of tow, forms of type and piles of wood-blocks, choked
the narrow thoroughfare.  The smells from the cheaper
eating-houses--where sausages frizzled in metal trays, and tea and
coffee steamed in huge tapped boilers, and piles of doubtful-looking
eggs, and curly rashers of streaky bacon were to be had by people
with money to pay for breakfast--even the sight of compositors in
clean shirt-sleeves and machine-men steeped in ink and oil to the
eyebrows eating snacks of bread and cheese and saveloy, and drinking
porter out of pewter on the doorsteps of great buildings roaring with
machinery--sickened P. C. Breagh with vain desire.

His world was all in ruins about him.  He was conscious of a painful
sense of stricture in the throat, and a tight pain as though a
knotted rope were bound about his temples.  His hand did not shake,
though, when he thrust it out under his eyes and looked at it
curiously.  But he shouldered his way so clumsily along the narrow,
crowded sidewalk that he found himself every now and then in
collision with some more or less incensed pedestrian, such as the
printer's devil, who cried, "Now then, Snobby, where are yer a-comin'
to?" or the stout red-faced matron in black, displaying a row of
bootlaces and a paper of small-tooth combs for sale--who emerged from
the swing-doors of a public-house as P. C. Breagh charged past them,
and wanted to know whether he called himself a young man or a mad
bull?  A well-dressed, elderly gentleman, carrying a calf-skin bag
and a gold-mounted umbrella, confounded him for a bungling,
blundering, blackguardly! ... and was left reveling in alliteratives
as the provoker of his wrath swung out of the Lane and found himself
upon the reported Tom Tiddler's ground of Fleet Street.  And then a
curious swirling giddiness overtook him, and he dropped down upon
some stone steps under the Gothic doorway of a church with a lofty
tower, and sat there with hunched shoulders and drooped head, staring
dully at the pavement between his muddy boots.

He was conscious of a dull resentment at his lot, but no base hatred
of that old man with the shattered skull, lying prone among the
bloody litter of his office-table, mingled with it.  All his life,
since that sixth birthday when he had learned the meaning of Death,
and the potential value of Money, the attainment of his twenty-third
year had been the goal toward which he had striven; and every third
of January crossed off the almanac "_brings me nearer,_" he had said
to himself, "_to the money that will be mine to spend as I shall
choose!_"

And now ... without a profession--for he had failed to obtain his
degrees in Medicine and Surgery--without funds, for a reason that did
him no dishonor--without books or belongings of any kind except the
clothes upon his back; without hope--for who can be hopeful on an
empty and craving stomach?--without work to occupy those strong young
hands and the sound, capable brain behind those gray, amber-flecked
eyes, the unlucky young man who had been reared on expectations sat
under St. Dunstan's Tower; and heard St. Dunstan's clock and St.
Paul's, and all the other City churches answer the boom of Big Ben of
Westminster, solemnly striking the hour of ten.

His prospects had been blighted and ruined, his young hopes lay dead:
he felt bruised and battered by the experiences and discoveries of
that birthday morning, as though the pair of wooden clock-giants that
some forty years back had figured among the City sights from their
vantage in the ancient steeple of St. Dunstan's, had beaten out the
hour with their mallets on his head.


His stepmother had always resented the monetary independence of her
husband's son by Milly Fermeroy.  Well! she and her vulgarities, her
resentments and jealousies, had long been laid to rest, poor soul!

In that bloody June of the Mutiny of '57 she and her two youngest
children had perished at Cawnpore.  A fortnight later Major Breagh,
previously wounded in the head by a shell-splinter in the defense of
the entrenchments, was bayoneted by a Sepoy infantryman during a
desperate sortie.

Carolan had remained as a boarder at the Preparatory School of the
Marist Fathers at Rockhampton where he had previously been placed,
thanks to the "interference," as Mrs. Breagh had phrased it, of the
regimental chaplain.  Father Haygarty.  And, owing to the same
influence, Monica, Carolan's junior by two years, had--after the
double stroke of Fate that left the children orphaned--been sent to
the Sisters of the Annunciation in London, the charges of her support
and education being defrayed out of the interest of Carolan's seven
thousand, and the compassionate allowance of twenty-five pounds
granted her by Government as the orphan daughter of an officer killed
in war.




VI

To-day, as P. C. Breagh sat paupered on the doorstep of St.
Dunstan's, he realized that, from childhood to this hour, dead
Milly's money had been his bane.

"When I was quite a little shaver I expected to be knocked under to,
and given the best of everything, because I was going to be rich one
day....  I knew my money kept my stepmother from grumbling and
nagging at me.  And--my first thrashing at Rockhampton was because
I'd bragged about it to a bigger boy.  He said when he let me get
up--that I should be obliged to him one day, if I wasn't at the
moment!  And my first fight--no, my second--because the first was
over my Irish brogue!--my second fight came off because I'd forgotten
my lesson, and talked about being able to drive four-in-hand, and
live up to a Commission in the Household Cavalry when I should come
of age....  Silly young idiot!  And when I was old enough for a
public school--and passed--I wonder, with my luck, how I managed to
pass?--into Bradenbury College--I had mills, no end! with the fellows
there, because I couldn't keep mum about my expectations."

He leaned his dusty elbows on his knees and went on thinking, as a
regular procession of legs of all sexes, ages, and colors went past,
and the muddy river of Fleet Street traffic roared over the
cobblestones, boiled in swirling eddies where it received the stream
flowing down Chancery Lane, and choked and gurgled in and out of the
squat archways of Temple Bar.

"I'd talked of Oxford as a preliminary to Sandhurst and a Cavalry
Commission--and I went in for an Exhibition Entrance--but my classics
queered me for the University.  Knock Number One!  The Head put it on
the Italianate Latin I'd learned from the Marist Fathers--and why old
Virgil, and Ovid, Horace, Cæsar, and Livy, and the rest of 'em,
should be supposed to have pronounced their language with a British
accent I've never been able to understand! ... When I went up for the
Woolwich Open Competitive--having altered my views about the
Household Cavalry!--my plane trigonometry dished me for the Royal
Horse Artillery....  Knock Number Two!  So I told myself that it
wasn't as easy getting into a Queen's uniform as it was in my
father's time....  You were given the Commission--or you bought
it--and if you could drill, and march, and fight, no more was asked
of you....  And I tried for the Royal Engineering College of
India--and failed in dynamics--and had a shot for the I.C.S.--and
missed again!  Oh, damn!  And do I owe every one of the whole string
of failures to the belief that money makes up for everything and buys
anything?  I'm half beginning to believe I do!  Even the kindness I
have had from people I'd no claim on--and who is there alive I have a
claim on?  Have I been cad enough--ape enough--worm enough--to put it
down to----Grrh!--how I loathe myself!"

He covered his reddened face with his hands and shuddered.  It is
horrible to have to go on living inside a fellow you have begun to
hate.

"Even Father Haygarty's untiring kindness, his interest in all I did
and thought and hoped for....  Weren't there times when I suspected
that my--in some degree representing property--accounted for--oh,
Lord!  And when he was dying and his housekeeper sent for me--for
he'd given up being an army chaplain and got a little living in
Gloucestershire--did I realize even then what a friend and father I
was losing?  I hope to God I did, but I'm hardly sure of myself!"

He stubbed with the toe of his muddy boot the jutting corner of a
paving-stone, and scowled at the image of himself that was growing
more and more distinct.  He had always thought P. C. Breagh rather a
fine young fellow.  Now he knew him for what he had always been.

"When Father Haygarty was gone--it wasn't long before Mustey and Son
began to send explanations and apologies, instead of the whole of the
quarter's interest-money.  There had been a drop in securities of
this kind and the other, and Consols were down--and at first I was as
pleased as a prize poodle at being made excuses to.....  But the fact
remained that where I'd been getting two hundred and forty, I was
only getting one hundred and seventy-three....  And that--if I really
meant to go in for my Degree in Surgery and Medicine, for I'd made up
my mind to be a medical swell--I had--if Monica was to go on staying
with the Sisters!--I'd got to give up the idea of Edinburgh, or the
London University, and matriculate somewhere abroad.  So I went to
Schwärz-Brettingen, and shared rooms with another English chap....
It was admitted I had solid abilities--the Professors whose lectures
I attended thought well of me.  And I failed!--Failed for the fourth
time!  Have I the accursed money to thank for that last blow?"

He perspired as though he had been running, and, indeed, nothing
takes it out of you like a spruit over the course of the past with
your conscience as pacer.

"I'd thought myself rather a fine fellow when, with my student-card
in my pocket and my _Anmeldungsbuch_ in my hand I called--in company
with a squad of other candidates--on the Rector Magnificus.  We had a
punch afterwards, and a drive and coffee at the Plesse--and made a
night of it at Fritz's.  I woke with a first-class student's headache
in the morning, and a hazy recollection that I'd told one or two of
the British colony--in confidence--and several Germans--about the
money I was coming into by-and-by...."

He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyelids together, trying to shut
out the picture of P. C. Breagh in the character of a howling cad.

"But if I bragged--and I did brag!--I worked....  The Marist Fathers
had grounded me in French and German in spite of myself, and my pride
had been nicely stung up by that failure for Sandhurst and the
others....  Men told me what I'd got to grind at, and I ground;
filling piles of lecture-pads with notes on all sorts of subjects.
Anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology....  My
brain was a salad of 'em--but I passed the _Abiturienteti-Examen_ at
a classical gymnasium with a better certificate than a lot of other
Freshmen--thanks to the Marist Fathers, who'd pounded Latin and Greek
into me!--and then--after two years of walking hospitals, attending
demonstrations and lectures, and doing laboratory-work--varied by
beers and _schläger_--and more beers and more _schläger_!--and
perhaps I took to sword-play all the more kindly because of the
soldier-blood in me!--came the first regular examination.  And I
don't forget that third of November--not while I'm breathing!"


_Donnerwetter_!  P. C. Breagh could see the cocked-hatted and
scarlet-gowned University beadle ushering a pale young man, with
saucers round his eyes, into the awful presence of the Dean, and
Examiners in the Faculties of Surgery and Medicine....

The neophyte--arrayed in the swallow-tail coat, low-cut vest, black
cloth inexpressibles, white cravat, and kid gloves inseparable from
an English dinner-party, or the ordeal of examination at a German
university, found his inquisitors also in formal full dress, seated
in a semicircle facing the door, and looking singularly cheerful.

A solitary chair marked the middle of the chord of the arc formed by
the chairs of the examiners.  Upon this stool of judgment--after
bowing and shaking hands all round and being bowed to and shaken--the
victim had been invited to seat himself.  The Dean opened the ball
with the Early Theorists.  And he had seemed quite to cotton to P. C.
Breagh's ideas on the subject of Egyptian Sacerdotal Colleges, the
preparation of Soma in the Vedas, the therapeutical formulas of
Zoroaster, Chinese sympathetic medicine--the dietetic method of
Hippocrates--who invented barley-water!--the observations of Diocles
and Chrysippus and the criticisms of Galen.  At the expiration of
half an hour, when the Hofrath delivered him over to the next
examiner, P. C. Breagh had felt that, if the others were no worse
than the Dean, all might yet be well.

Professor Barselius, who followed the Dean, and was reported to be a
terror, when correctly replied to upon an interrogation as to the
chemical composition of the fatty acids, vouchsafed a grunt of
approbation.

Professor Troppenritt, who succeeded Barselius, was a person with a
reputation for amiability, and a mobility of mental constitution
which enabled him to flit like the butterfly or leap like the
grasshopper from subject to subject, harking back to Number One,
perhaps, when you felt quite sure he had done with it for good.  But
on that fateful third of November a tricksy demon seemed to possess
Troppenritt.  He no longer flitted like the butterfly, or hopped like
the grasshopper--he sported with the seven great departments of
Structural Anatomy, Physiology, Pathological Anatomy, General
Pathology, Ophthalmology, Medicine, Hygiene and Midwifery--as a
fountain might toss up glass balls, or a conjurer juggle with
daggers....  His victim after a while found himself breathlessly
watching the hugh knobby rampart of forehead, behind which the
Professor's intentions were hiding, in the vain hope that the next
question might be foreshadowed on its shining surface.  A hope
destined never to be fulfilled....

The fact remains that P. C. Breagh, after some really creditable
answers, was beginning to recover the use of his mental faculties,
when the Dean--prompted by the candidate's evil genius--suggested a
little pause for cake and wine.  It was awful to see how Hofrath and
Professors--there were three of them besides the conjurer
Troppenritt--enjoyed themselves at this sacrificial banquet, which
had been arranged upon a little table in a corner, waiting the
five-minute interval.  And P. C. Breagh rejected cake, which was of
the gingerbread variety, garnished with blanched almonds and
sugar-plums.  But the single glass of Rüdesheimer he accepted might
have been the Brobdingnagian silver-mounted horn that hung within a
garland of frequently-renewed laurel leaves upon the walls of a
famous students' beer-hall--or have been filled with raw spirits
above proof,--the contents mounted so unerringly to his head, and
wreaked such havoc therein.

The three remaining Professors were almost tender with the sufferer,
but what Troppenritt had begun, the wine had completed.  The _nicht
wahr's_ had been succeeding one another at marked intervals,--like
distress-signals or funereal minute-guns, when the traditional three
hours expired.

P. C. Breagh--removed to cold storage in the anteroom--was detained
but five minutes longer....  His nervous shiverings had reached a
crescendo, when the beadle opened the door....  And the Dean,
stepping forward, in staccato accents delivered himself:

"Candidate, from the quality of the dissertations in writing
previously submitted, we, the Faculty of Surgery and Medicine of the
University of Schwärz-Brettingen--would a more satisfaction-imparting
result have anticipated as the result of the just-concluded oral
examination undergone by you....  But although lacking in
_Gedächtniss_--has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable
degree of _Einbildung_ and _Begriff_ that the Faculty
of-hesitation-none-whatever have in the
following-advice-to-you-imparting;--Yourself another semester give,
or better still, another twelvemonth! and try again, young man!--try
again!"

Not bad advice, if the young man had chosen to follow it.  But
January drew near, and the inheritor-expectant of seven thousand
pounds scorned to toil and moil over intellectual ground already
traversed.  He had tried for honors, and he had failed, thanks to the
hypnotizing methods of the too-agile Troppenritt.

So P. C. Breagh spent the money that would have kept him, with
economy, for six months, in giving a farewell banquet to his friends;
called--in his best attire, with kid gloves and a buttonhole
bouquet--on his favorite lecturers; left cards on the wives of those
who possessed them; paid his landlady--who had faithfully labored to
convert his formal, class-room German into a malleable, useful
tongue,--kissed her round cheek--tipped the civil servant-maid five
dollars,--and turned his back for ever on Schwärz-Brettingen, its
_Aula, Collegien-Haus, Theatrum Anatomicum_, Botanical Garden,
Library and Career--(a correctional edifice the interior
accommodations of which were only known to him by hearsay),--its
restaurants, beer-saloons, coffee-gardens, and fencing-halls; its
chilly wood-stoves, its glowing enthusiasms; its pleasant
companionships, its passing flirtations with _schoppen_-bearing
Hebes, and nymphs of the coffee-garden, restaurant, or ninepin alley.
One cannot say its love-affairs, because in the esteem of P. C.
Breagh--though Passion might bloom red by the wayside at every mile
of a man's journey--Love was a rare blossom found once in a lifetime,
too often never found at all.

P. C. Breagh's idea of Love was that it should be spelt with a
capital, and spoken of in whispers.  Nor, let us hint, was the ideal
Woman at whose feet, he promised himself, he would one day pour forth
all the gold and jewels of his heart and intellect, a being to be
lightly trifled with.


To commence with, she would have to be six feet high or
thereabouts....  Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, of classical features,
cream-and-rose complexion, powerful intellect and thews matching, the
ideal woman of P. C. Breagh must have weighed about fourteen stone.
He imagined her a kind of Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--with
a dash of Mary Queen of Scots, Kingsley's Hypatia, and a spice of
Edith Dombey and the beautiful shrewish Roman Princess out of "The
Cloister and the Hearth"--though these heroines were jetty-locked,
and for this reason fell short of P. C. Breagh's ideal of female
loveliness.  Fair and colossal, he had seen her over and over
again,--though a little too roseate and pulpy in texture to come up
to his ideal--in the vast canvases of Kaulbach and in the
overwhelming frescoes of the Bavarian Spiess.  But he had never yet
encountered her in the flesh.  One day they would meet--and she would
be scornful of the young, obscure, unknown man who looked at her--she
felt it from the first, and that made her quite furious!--with the
eye of a consciously superior being--a master in posse.

All the masculine world would bow down before the intellect combined
with the beauty--of Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--and so on,
for he amalgamated new heroines with the others, in the course of his
reading.  But one man lived who would not bow down.  She would taunt
him with this stiff-necked pride of his, in the course of an
interview on the terrace of a castle, whose moat he had swum and
whose guarded ramparts he had scaled in order to be discovered,
scorning her, and communing with the moon.  And he would quell her
tempestuous wrath, and silence her reproaches, by telling her that it
was for her to pay homage and court smiles.  Then she would summon
her vassals and lovers, and half a dozen of them would set upon P. C.
Breagh, who would strangle one with his naked hands, run another
through with his own sword--and provide materials, broadly speaking,
for half a dozen first-class funerals--before he leapt into the moat,
carrying a rose that she had dropped between his teeth---and "_gained
the distant bank in safety,_" or "_dripping and bloody, emerged from
the dark water, gripped an iron chain, eaten with the rust of
centuries, and, painfully scaling the frowning masonry, disappeared
into the..._" etc.

Absurd, if you will, and bombastic and impossibly high-flown.  Yet
such boyish dreams keep the soul clean and the body from grosser
stain.  Walking with your head erect you may stub your toe, and come
a cropper on the stones occasionally.  But you pick yourself up again
and proceed more warily--none the less rejoicing, seeing the splendor
of the sunset, or braving the blaze of noonday, or drinking in the
delicate spring-like hues of dawn....

One does not know how long P. C. Breagh might have remained upon the
steps of St. Dunstan's, had not the hour of twelve sounded from the
new clock--a youngster barely forty years old--that had replaced the
gong-hammering wooden giants, now on view outside the Marquis of
Hertford's villa in Regent's Park.  A constable civilly asked him to
move on.  He got up, heavily, and mechanically felt for his watch
that was in keeping of the landlord of the fourth-rate hostelry in
the Euston Road.  And it occurred to him--as a pin-prick among
innumerable stiletto strokes--that the watch alone, being a heavy
silver one attached to a slender gold snake-chain once the property
of dead Milly--would have satisfied the man's claim, which,
exorbitant as it was for the accommodation afforded, was considerably
under three pounds.  You are to understand that P. C. Breagh had been
so certain of returning in a few hours, heavy with ready money, that
he had treated the landlord's detention of his luggage as a joke.

The present situation was no joke.  But Youth preserves above all the
property of rising unbruised and elastic from a tumble, and of
healing readily when it has sustained mental or physical wounds!

The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with the finer
strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy.  He had no idea of
finding a craven's refuge in suicide.  The single shilling remaining
to him might purchase sufficient strychnine for a painful, unheroic
exit, but P. C. Breagh was not disposed to invest his remaining
capital in that unpleasant alkaloid.  And neither did it occur to him
then to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy liquid
running under any one of London's bridges, from Westminster to the
Tower.  For by the contradictory law of Nature, reversing scientific
fact, a helpless weight that hung about his strong young neck kept
his moral head above the turbid waters of Despondency.


He was not alone in the world.  There was Monica.  With the
remembrance of that frail link, binding him to the rest of humanity,
awakened in him the desire to see her.  He turned his face Westward
and stepped into the moving throng.




VII

The Great Class fermented in irrepressible excitement.  Subsequently
to the arrival of a foreign mail, Juliette Bayard had been summoned
by an attendant lay-sister to the presence of Mère M. Catherine-Rose.

She had remained nearly half an hour in the Parlor of Cold Feet--so
called in recognition of the fact that the apartment contained no
fireplace, and that even in the hottest weather cool draughts played
hide-and-seek across the polished parquet from circular brazen
gratings inserted in the wainscot, which ancient legend connected
with the presence of a French _calorifère_.

When the door opened and Juliette emerged, somewhere about the middle
of the noon recreation, an advance-patrol in the shape of a pupil of
the Little Class, by name Laura Foljambe--happened to be buttoning a
shoe-strap at the end of the corridor.  The apoplectic attitude
inseparable from this particular employment would have rendered
observation impossible--in the case of an adult.  But Laura, under
the cover of a luxuriant head of yellow ringlets, unconfined by any
comb or ribbon, observed, firstly, that Juliette had been crying, and
secondly, that Mère M. Catherine-Rose had tears in her own eyes.
More, she had called Juliette back, embraced her affectionately, and
said: "We shall miss you, my dear!"  "You will be brave, I know!" and
"Remember to write!"  Packed with news, Laura rushed into the Lesser
Hall, where the seniors were gathered round the stove, the raw chill
of the January weather rendering the garden a place of penitence, and
emptied her budget of intelligence upon the spot.

Juliette must be going away!  The forty girls of the Great Class had
unanimously arrived at this conclusion when Juliette herself arrived
upon the scene.  It needed but a glance to assure her of the
treachery of Laura; it needed but a moment, and the spy, blubbering
and protesting, was seized, shaken, and forced upon her knees.

You are to understand that when Juliette Bayard was angry, she was so
with a vengeance.  Heroic by temperament, her wrath smacked of the
superhuman.  A demi-goddess enraged might have manifested as
semi-divine a frenzy.  Ordinary prose seemed too poor a vehicle to
convey such indignation.  You expected hexameters or Alexandrines....

"That you listened I would stake my honor!--I would pledge my
life!--I would put the hand in the fire!  Mean!  Base!  Despicable!
Ah, you look simple, little thing, but you are cunning as a
mouse--fine as amber!  No!  I do not pinch, I would scorn it--you
know that perfectly!  Yes!  I will permit you to go when you confess
who set you on!"

Laura, unwilling to incur the resentment of forty grown-ups,
undesirous of forfeiting the saccharine reward of treachery, boohooed
in a whisper, for class-hour was approaching.  The wrathful goddess
towered over her, eyed with blue lightning, crowned with dusky clouds
of thunder, flushed like the sunset that comes after the day of storm.

Had Arthur Hughes or Fred Walker been privileged to peep--one painter
at least would have armed her uplifted hand with a bulrush-spear,
helmeted her with a curled water-lily leaf, and given the smiling
world Titania in the character of Pallas Athene, or Queen Mab as an
Amazon.  And Juliette would never have pardoned the painter.
For--despite the testimony of her tale of inches--she would have it
that she was tall, even above the average height of woman.

"I shall not be beautiful, no! but I shall be commanding!" she had
assured those favored girls on whom she deigned to bestow her
imperial confidence.  This select number in turn possessing a circle
of confidantes, the drop of a secret meant a series of widening
rings, extending to the circle of the day scholars, reaching the
Orphanage by-and-by, and trickling at length into the basement, where
the Poor School assembled on Wednesdays and Fridays, to gather up the
crumbs of knowledge that fell from the tables of the daughters of the
great and rich.

You may imagine the scene in Lesser Hall upon this chilly day in
January.  Excitement was much more warming than crowding round the
smoky stoves.  Of the semi-circle of great girls in their black
school-dresses, enlivened only by the red or white class-rosettes, or
the pale blue ribbons of the Children of Mary, all the heads, adorned
with every shade of feminine tresses,--all the eyes of all colors,
set in faces plain or pretty--were turned toward the tragic figure of
Juliette.

Once kindled, such violet fires of wrath blazed in those implacable
eyes, one would have supposed nothing could ever quench them.  But
when she was sorrowful, they were bottomless lakes of misery.
Despair lay drowned and wan amid the long black sedges drooping at
their borders.  Under the dark, hollowed precipices that shadowed
them it seemed as though no sun could ever shine.  But when the laugh
was born, it leaped to the surface with a quiver that caught the
light and flashed it back pure sapphire or loveliest Persian
turquoise.  No face ever framed of earthly clay had more of the mirth
of Heaven in it, then.  Her long upper lip, the elastic, mobile
feature that could draw out to so portentous a length, would be
haunted by flying smiles, and the deep-cut corners of her short
scarlet under lip would quiver.  To inventory the beauties of a young
lady and omit the nose would suggest cause for reticence on the
writer's part.  Juliette's nose was not of Greek or Roman type, but
neither was it snubbed or tip-tilted.  It had a rounded end, and
deep, curved, passionate nostrils.  It pertained to no known order of
nasal architecture.  It was Juliette's nose, and could never have
belonged to anybody else.

If you would more of her,--and after the first encounter you either
sought or shunned--loved or loathed--as she would have had you do who
was in all things sincere and candid, you are to understand that her
cloud of dusky hair framed a small oval face that made no show of
carnation or vaunt of rose.  Her clear fine skin was almost always
pale.  She would have laughed you to scorn had you likened those
colorless cheeks of hers to lilies.  She prided herself upon a frame
of mind eminently commonplace, antipodean to the romantic.  "I am
sensible, me!" you often heard her say.

In form--though as you know she believed herself to be a
giantess--she was small and slight, and not at all remarkable.  A
framework of slender bones, frugally covered with tender, healthful
flesh.  Her shoulders sloped so much that in her loose-bodied,
full-sleeved, black merino school uniform she seemed about to vanish.
Her hips were narrow, without the voluptuous curves that belong to
heroines.  But a Divine jest had added to her little high-arched head
a tiny pair of rosy shells for hearing, and the palms and nails and
finger-tips of her narrow hands,--and feet I have heard it said by
some who loved her--were roseate also.  The younger children liked to
pretend that this was a judgment on Juliette for stealing
strawberries in the early June season, but she only joined in that
one raid on the Sisters' kitchen-garden "To be a good comrade!" ...
and as it happened, all the strawberries were slug-eaten.  And where
are there strawberries worth the stealing, unless it be in France?

For next to God and Our Lady, and her father M. le Colonel, Juliette
Bayard loved her country.  Paradise was but an improvement on France,
to hear her describe it to the little ones.  Further, though she had
a perfect taste in dress, when released from the school uniform;
though an ordinary hat under her deft transforming fingers would
become a miracle of exquisite millinery; her groups of flowers, and
landscapes, in water-color, her crayon dog's heads, were mercifully
hidden from the drawing-master's eye.  She sang out of tune, but in
time; played correctly, but hated the piano; danced like an
air-wafted tuft of dandelion-down or a gnat upon a summer
evening,--and had a Heaven-born gift for housekeeping and cookery.

Of this last gift more anon.  Meanwhile Laura writhed, or seemed to
writhe, under the torrent of passionate reproaches, culminating in
another shake, and a slap which might have damaged a kitten
newly-born.  Laura fell prone, moaning and gurgling.  And Juliette,
pierced by remorse at her own ruthlessness, sank, pale as ashes,
beside the victim's corse.

"Darling Laura! sweetest Laura!--tell me I have not hurt you!  Just
Heaven! how could I strike you?--I, who am so strong!  Indeed, I
might have killed you! ...  Pray for me, my little angel!  It will
need a miracle to cure my temper, as Mother Veronica constantly says.
Cannot you get up?  Do try, to please me!  Tell me where you feel
most injured?  Quick, or I know I shall be angry again! ... Show me
the bruise!  Pouf! that is a mere nothing!  I will kiss it and make
it well, and you shall have the blue bead Rosary."

The mention of the blue beads palpably restored vitality.  The
sufferer was understood to intimate that a chocolate elephant would
absolutely complete the cure.

"The elephant to-morrow when the Great Class return from the
promenade.  The Rosary before Benediction.  Away with you!"

Laura scuttled.  Juliette blew her a parting kiss, and said, with a
comprehensive glance of scorn at the faces of her classmates:

"It was not she who deserved the----  I have not the expression! ...
It is one of your English words that mean many things together ... a
kiss ... a blow ... the boat of a sailor who catches fishes and
crabs....  I have seen such boats at Havre and Weymouth, and they are
very pretty....  Ah!  Now I remember.  You call them fishing-spanks!"

The Class shrieked.  Juliette stood calmly while the tumult of
laughter and exclamations raged about her.  Her long upper lip shut
down upon its scarlet neighbor, her brows frowned a little; her
slender arms, lost in their loose sleeves, hung straightly by her
narrow sides.  Millais would, seeing her, have painted a maiden
martyr.  Watts might have limned her as Persephone new-loosed from
the dark embrace of Dis, her wooer, taking her first timid steps upon
the glowing floor of Hell.

"When you have finished making so much noise--_peu importe_--but I
have a piece of news to tell you.  You are none of you
inquisitive--that goes without saying!--or you would not have
dispatched that poor infant to play the spy outside the parlor door.
Bridget-Mary and Alethea Bawne, I do not mean you--you are souls of
honor--incapable of curiosity! ... Also, Monica Breagh, _c'est là son
moindre defaut_!  But there are others--yet my friends--who are not
so delicate,--and to these I address myself.  You do not deserve to
hear--and yet I cannot be unkind to you; I, who have such joy of the
heart in the knowledge that I am to return to my dear father!--such
grief--ah! but such grief of the soul in bidding adieu to the School!"

"Not for good?"

"You are going to leave the School?"

"Dear, darling Juliette, say you're only joking!"

"She is in earnest.  Look at her upper lip!"

"_Vous moquez-vous du monde de parler ainsi!_"

Throbbed out a Spanish voice, husky and passionate:

"_Qué vergüenza!  No, no, es imposible!_"

"Sure, dear, you'd not be so cruel as to make game of us?"

She stood her ground, firm, but no longer frowning.  Her heart
swelled, her eyes were heavy with the promise of rain.  Her slender
arms went out as though she would have embraced them all.

"My dears, it is true!  I go to Versailles to rejoin my father.  He
says to me also--I have his letter here!" ...

Silence fell upon the turbulent crowd as she laid a slender hand on
the place where her heart could be seen throbbing.  The paper
rustled, but she did not draw it forth.

"He says, in this--I am to be married ... soon,--very quickly!"

A Babel of cries, ejaculations, and exclamations broke out about her.
A girl's voice, more strident than the rest, shrieked:

"I hate your father!  Beast!" and broke down in hysterical sobbing.
Juliette replied, those about her hushed to hear; and in the oasis of
silence her tender, silvery voice rose like a fountain springing from
the heart of purity.

"My father is not what you say, but the Emperor's brave soldier and a
noble gentleman.  I am proud to obey when he commands!  He has said
to me that I am to be married, and does he not know what is best for
me?  Would he wish to bring unhappiness upon his Juliette?"

She was not so much loyal as Loyalty personified, standing there
defending him; with her little hand keeping down her bursting heart
of anguish, and salt lakes of unshed tears pent up behind her
sorrowful sapphire eyes....  Her voice broke as she said "his
Juliette," and one of the Bawnes, a stately, black-browed girl,
answered, speaking in French:

"He would not if he is--what you have described him! ... But--unless
you knew of this before--it is so sudden....  It would seem to argue
that M. le Colonel was thinking more--you will not be offended!--of
the happiness of his future son-in-law than of his daughter's----"

"_Non, non, non!_"  She made an emphatic gesture with her little
hand, and shook her head so that a tear fell from her lashes on the
bosom of her black school-dress, "Dear Lady Biddy--you are mistaken.
For--comprehend you?--my happiness is in obeying that beloved father,
always.  For me, there is no greater joy....  And his letter bears
date of the New Year--three days since--behold the postmark.  It is
the custom to give young people étrennes at that season--my father
bestows on me a husband, and I am--content!  See you well?"

It was faulty English, yet Juliette's "See you well?" haunted the
music-loving ear.

And now even the reserved began to question, while the frankly
curious waxed importunate concerning the date of Mademoiselle
Bayard's impending departure, the name, rank and personal appearance
of the mysterious husband-elect, the number and uniform of his
regiment.  For, of course, he was certain to be an officer of
Cavalry, Dragoons, Lancers, or Cuirassiers.  That he must be handsome
went without saying; but were his eyes dark or light, and did he wear
a moustache only, or sport the hirsute ornament in conjunction with
an imperial?  Beset from all quarters, Juliette was beginning to lose
command of herself, when the hour of two struck from the great clock
in the corridor.

The clang-clang of an iron bell succeeded, the double doors at the
upper end of the Hall rolled backward, uniting the Great and the
Middle Classes in the religious exercise that opened afternoon
School.  The hymn sung, the brief litany chanted to an accompaniment
played on the harmonium by a mistress in the purple habit and creamy
veil of the choir-sisters, another nun approached Juliette and
whispered in her ear.

She was to go to the dormitory and pack her trunk, which would
presently be brought her by one of the lay-sisters.  And this done,
she was free to spend the half-hour previous to Benediction in the
parlor with----

The name was lost in Juliette's embrace and kiss of gratitude.  She
was usually chary of caresses, perhaps she wished to hide her eyes.

They were fairly overflowing, poor eyes! when their owner gained the
solitude of her white-draped cubicle in the Greats' dormitory.  Once
the curtains fell behind her she was free to fall upon her knees
beside the bed and sob there, to call upon Our Lady for succor and
pity, to rock herself and hug her bleeding heart.  And all these
things Juliette did, until the dull thump of felt shoes upon the
shining boards betokened the arrival of the lay-sister, bearing the
oilskin-covered dress-basket, disinterred from some below-stairs
repository, which had to be filled from the locker, dress-hooks, and
drawers.

Ten minutes had been devoured in grief, forty yet remained for
packing.  A lover of method in all things, frugal and prudent in the
expenditure of resources ("_I am sensible, me!_"), Juliette was
economical of time.  Ten minutes might be spared to re-perusal of the
letter that had set her faith in that dearest father rocking like a
palm in tempest, and wrung such tears of anguish from the heart that
worshiped him.

She drew the bulky envelope from its pure hiding-place, kissed it,
and moaned a little.  There were three sheets of thin foreign note,
flourished over in a big, bold, soldierly hand.  The date bore
evidence that the letter had been penned on the Eve of Saint
Sylvestre, answering to our New Year's Eve.  The address was:


  "_Barracks of the 777th Regiment,_
    "_Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard,_
      "_Versailles._

"_My Daughter,_

"_Of news thy father has not much to tell thee that thou wouldst find
of the most interesting, save that of the fashions prevailing in
Paris at the moment, the most daring and eccentric is the little hat
or miniature bonnet, tilted forward upon the forehead by the chignon,
and spangled with beetles, dragon-flies, and other brilliant insects.
Jeweled birds, yachts in full sail, or baskets of flowers, dangle
from the ears of all the feminine world!_

"_The Empress is as beautiful as even she could wish to be.  I saw
her driving a pair of little thoroughbred mares in the low
park-phœton yesterday in the Bois, near the Rond des Cascades.
She was so gracious as to recognize me--though I was in civilian
riding-dress--and beckoned me with her parasol-whip from the line of
equestrians respectfully mustered on the left side of the road.  She
patted the gray Mustapha--thou wilt be glad thy horse was so
honored!--and asked if I was quite recovered of the wound I received
at Solferino,--proving that an Imperial memory can be conferred with
the hand that raises to Imperial rank.  Later on I met Dumas, and--at
the corner of the Rue Laffitte--Baron Rothschild and Cham, the
caricaturist--and there thou hast a résumé of the encounters of the
day._

"_Do political matters really interest thee?  Learn, then, a new
Ministry is in formation by M. Emile Ollivier--a 'homogeneous
cabinet,' is to be drawn chiefly from the Left Center in the Corps
Législatif.  My father's friend, M. le Général Lebœuf, Minister of
War, retains the post he held in the expired Administration.  M. le
Maréchal Vaillant continues as Minister of the Emperor's Household.
Haussmann has fallen! his ten thousand hands will no longer scatter
gold from the Imperial Treasury.  The last announcement emanating
from the Prefecture of the Seine gave notice that the cemeteries of
Mont-Parnasse, Montmartre, Ivry, and others are to be seized by the
municipality in 1871.  All the private monuments are to be withdrawn
before the first of April....  With what sorrow of heart these tragic
removals will be effected thou wilt realize, who hast so often
accompanied thy father, bearing wreaths to lay upon thy grandmother's
tomb at Père Lachaise.  Pray that the necessity to find a home for
those sacred, beloved ashes may not devolve upon us._

"_Thou must know that in October, during the maneuvers at the camp of
Châlons, a new and terrible weapon was placed in the hands of the
Imperial army of France.  It is the _Mitrailleuse_, conceived by the
brain of De Reffye--an invention worthy to rank with that of the
Chassepôt rifle, which fulfilled such great expectations the first
time the weapon was used in action, at Mentana, against the
Garibaldians.  How shall I describe it?  I will say, briefly, that it
is a rifled, breech-loading gun of from fourteen to twenty-nine
barrels; that it has as many locks as barrels; that it can be
transported from place to place by two men, and fired by one, who
manipulates a lever, sitting upon a saddle attached to the
gun-carriage.  And that it is a mill that grinds--a machine that
hails--death upon an enemy.  Armed with batteries of these invincible
weapons, the march of an invading army would be irresistible!_

"_Two of these marvelous guns have been by the Imperial favor
bestowed upon our regiment.  The men baptized them in wine by the
names of Didi and Bibi.  They are treated as regimental infants, and
thrive exceedingly well._

"_My child, whether this news will make thee sad or joyful it must be
that Juliette joins her father here at Versailles not later than on
the twentieth of the month of January.  Madame la Supérieure will
supply thee with funds in exchange for the enclosed note of credit
furnished me by my bankers.  Purchase thyself--on arriving in
Paris--for certainly the modes of London will never content a taste
so fastidious--some fresh and charming toilettes of the evening,
costumes for the house, theater or promenade, and suitable lingerie.
Last, but not least, bring a marriage-robe, crown and veil.  I am not
joking, I assure thee!  For my daughter I have found a husband.  A
young man, sincere, upright, honorable, and a good Catholic, whom I
have known from boyhood, whom my child will love as a wife should;
and by whom she will be adored and cherished.  Thou knowest Charles
Tessier, the son of my mother's widowed friend, the estimable Madame
Tessier, whom we have visited in the Rue de Provence, Versailles!
Charles has succeeded to his father's large businesses at Paris,
Lyons, and in Belgium, as a manufacturer of woolen dress-materials,
the pattern Écossais, so much in favor with S.M. the Empress and the
belles of the Imperial Court, having been imported, woven and
supplied by this wise, enterprising and energetic young man.
Who--but it will be for his wife to perceive and praise his many
excellencies.  I leave thee to the pleasant task of discovering them._

"_My Juliette, if so much of thy father mingles in thy nature that of
all careers this of a soldier seems to thee the noblest--if the
pursuit and attainment of military glory--distinctions won upon the
field of War, appeal to thee--as Heaven knows they have to me!--since
my blood first learned to thrill at the roll of the drum--and leap at
the sound of the trumpet--if thou hast pictured in thy innocent
mind--loved in thy spotless dreams--some brave and noble officer
chosen for thee by him who now writes--tear the picture!--forget the
dream!  For when such dreams become realities they are--how often
rudely shattered by the rush and shock of armies meeting in the
blood-stained field of War!_

"_My dear, War is a monster composed of flesh, and iron, and steel,
that like the dragon or chimera of classical mythology--devours the
hopes of virgins and the happiness of matrons, and leaves children
orphans and homes heaps of dust.  Thou rememberest thy grandmother?
She had been married just five years when my father reddened with his
heart's blood the soil of Algeria.  Yet when I wished to follow the
profession of arms she did not endeavor to dissuade me.  She hid her
anguish as only mothers can, but her beloved life was shortened by
anxiety undergone during the terrible war of the Crimea; that war so
protracted, so disastrous to our brave ally of England--so fraught
with loss and suffering to the more fortunate army of France.  And
that was not the only blow Fate dealt me while I served as
_aide-de-camp_ upon the staff of M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier.  Thou
dost not know as yet!--one day I may find courage to tell thee....
Even a soldier may shrink from baring wounds that are of the soul._

"_My daughter, I have never spoken to thee of thy mother....  The
time has arrived when----_"

The sixteen words were lined out by a heavy stroke of the quill.  The
closing sentences were----

"_In the event of War abroad--taking thy father from thee--perhaps to
lay his bones in a trench hastily dug by peasants in some foreign
province!--or in the event of War at home,--sudden,
unexpected--sweeping as a cataclysm over thy native soil, thou wilt
believe me, my Juliette, when I tell thee this marriage would be
absolutely for the best!  Living or dead, for me to know thee safe
and cherished, here at Versailles with thy husband Charles and his
estimable mother, would be happiness....  Wilt thou consent to the
union?  Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves thee as his soul?  One
finds this a scrawl which will prove difficult to decipher.  As thou
knowest, I am a better artist with the sword than with the pen._

"_Written here at my new quarters, which comprise a sleeping chamber
and boudoir elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady of
refinement; and a little kitchen, full of pots and bright pans._

  "_Thy father,_
    "_HENRI-ANTOINE-ALBERT DE BAYARD,_
      "_Colonel Commandant._"




VIII

Will it not be admitted that a letter such as this was calculated to
cause a flutter of agitation in the meekest feminine bosom?  To be
recalled from School before the completion of the tiresome process
technically known as "finishing," that was matter for rejoicing.  The
little bedroom-boudoir in the Colonel's quarters at the Cavalry
Barracks, "elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady of
refinement," presented an alluring picture, the tiny kitchen, "full
of pots and bright pans," charmed....

For Mademoiselle de Bayard, going back to her Colonel after two
years' absence, laden as the working-bee with the honey of
accomplishments and the well-kneaded wax of useful knowledge,
promised herself that it should not be long before her idol should be
convinced by practical demonstration that his Juliette had not
forgotten how to cook.  Irish stew, saddle-of-mutton with
onion-sauce, pancakes, Scotch collops, English plum-pudding and
mince-pies had been added to her lengthy list of recipes, by grace of
the Convent cook, Sister Boniface, who had permitted the ardent
amateur to experiment in a second kitchen, used in hot weather,
abutting on the garden, and not regarded as a portion of the nuns'
enclosure.

To return, and resume the old dear life of companionship, how sweetly
welcome had been the summons.  But nothing could disguise the taste
of the powder that came after the jam.

You are to conceive the struggle in Juliette's faithful heart between
obedience and anger.  Marry, my faith! yes!  Every sensible young
girl naturally expected to be married; but a husband approved of by
oneself, if selected by one's father--that was what one had had
reason to expect.

And this Charles, eulogized as wise, sensible, far-seeing, and
business-like.  Were these qualities, though naturally desirable in
the estimation of a father-in-law, attributes that weighed down the
scale in the opinion of a bride?  Had one ever beheld him?  She shut
her eyes and summoned up all the masculine faces in her gallery of
mental portraits, dismissing one after the other with no's, and no's,
and no's! ... Was it not horrible to have to admit even to oneself
that one had not the faintest recollection of ever having seen or
spoken to him?  Madame Tessier she remembered well as a little,
stout, very _gentille_ and amiable, elderly lady, whom she had
visited with M. le Colonel, who had embraced one cordially, and
insisted on one's partaking--immediately and at great length--of a
collation of sandwiches, fruit, cakes, and syrups; excellent--and to
a hungry school-girl, welcome at any hour of the day.  What more? ...
Ah, yes!  Madame had much deplored Charles's absence, possibly at
Lyons or in Belgium.  Further, Madame had remarked to M. le Colonel:

"My friend, your Juliette is the image of her beloved grandmother!"

"Will nobody ever say that I am like my mother?" Juliette had gaily
cried.  And with a strange stiff smile, the Colonel had answered for
Madame Tessier,--who at that juncture had opportunely upset a dish of
little sugar-cakes.

"There have been moments, my child, when I have"--he coughed rather
awkwardly for M. le Colonel--"anticipated that a resemblance might
exist."

Could he have been on the verge of saying "feared," and substituted
the other word at the last moment?  Such an idea was ridiculous, yet
it had occurred to Juliette.

To questions on the subject of the faintly remembered mother the
grandmother had been impervious.  The Colonel had always
answered--yet with palpable reticence....

"You have no mother, my little Juliette; she was taken from us, my
child, while I was absent with the Army in the Crimea," or "She left
us, while yet I was detained in Eastern Russia, serving as aide upon
the staff of M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier....  It is true, she was
both good and beautiful when I married her!  Now run and play!"  Or,
in later years: "Now come and read to me!" or "Walk with me," or
"Ride with me," or "Now tell me how and where thou didst learn to
turn out such savory dishes with those tiny _pattes de mouche_ of
thine?  Nowhere is there a _chef_ whose choicest efforts can com-pare
with my Juliette's.  And I have dined with the Emperor--and with
Milord Hertford at Bagatelle--and with Consul-General Baron
Rothschild--and--_parole d'honneur!_--I have told them so!"

And all the time M. le Colonel had been keeping back something....
Was it not strange, thought Juliette, that, while upon the
anniversary of the _Jour des Mort_ Mass had invariably been offered
for all deceased relatives of the De Bayard family, the actual date
of the death of one so young and beautiful had never been marked with
special solemnity.

Could it be that the lost mother was not dead, but living!  Oh, but
impossible! ... And yet--once awakened, the doubt would never sleep
again....


Did ever a girl receive such a letter?  It was fuller of darts than
even the fabled porcupine.  It awakened stinging doubts of the
kindness of the gentlest and tenderest of fathers.  "_Tear the
picture!--forget the dream!_" he had said.  Ah, my Heaven! what young
girl cherishes not such images--such visions! ... Juliette wondered
sorrowfully.  Sitting on her school locker, lost in thought, her
elbows on her knees, her little pointed chin cupped in the slender
hands, you saw her as a haggard, weary little creature.  For while
joy made of Juliette a living rainbow, grief transformed her to the
wan and rigid nymph that droops above a classic urn upon a mourning
cameo; and anxiety or suspense or remorse of soul set a changeling in
her place, wizened her, pinched her, struck her prematurely old.

She might--to employ hyperbole--have been sitting on her locker until
the present hour, had not her sad eyes lighted upon a colored
photograph of M. le Colonel in full military harness and equipment,
contained in a little ivory frame fastened by a safety-pin to one of
the starched white dimity curtains that imparted an air of select
privacy to the little white-covered dormitory bed.

You are to behold Juliette's father--_per_ medium of this
pen-portrait--and would that you might have heard his cordial voice,
and pressed his living hand....  Conceive him as a little man; and
somewhat stout and paunchy; you would never have dared to term him so
in the presence of Juliette.  And yet so manly, soldierlike and
ingratiating was the boldly-featured face, with its brave eyes,
curled moustache and imperial; the fur talpack with the green and
scarlet plume and the red Hussar bag, was worn with such an air; the
dolman of fine green cloth, laced and corded with heavy _galons_ of
silver and faced with the brilliant red of his silver-striped
pantaloons, fitted his compact round person with such creaseless
tightness; his silver-striped _ceinture_, belts and buckles were so
_point-device_; his spurred Hessian boots graced such neat small
feet; his right hand rested on his hip, his left upon the hilt of his
long saber, with so pleasant a grace, that you could not but warm to
this picture of a cavalry commander.

His daughter melted even as she gazed.  The generous soul, once
wrought to the pitch of heroism, piles sacrifice on sacrifice.  She
had meant to temporize, but she would not do so now.  She began to
comprehend, as stray sentences of the father's letter floated back,
that his mood had been sorrowful when he wrote it; and that those
wounds of the soul he spoke of had been bleeding, though hidden from
his daughter, many a year....  He was never sentimental; that
sentence about laying his bones in a trench hastily dug by peasants
in a foreign province had been struck from the steel of his nature by
some flint hurled from the sling of Fate.  The words that followed,
picturing War,--sudden, unexpected, sweeping as a cataclysm over the
country,--had the solemnity of deep organ-notes.  And the rushing
tenderness in the words, "_Living or dead, to know thee safe and
cherished!_" thrilled, and the dignity of the entreaty touched and
conquered: "_Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves thee as his soul?
..._"

You saw light and warmth and youth and loveliness visibly flowing
back into her as she looked at the picture.  The witches' changeling
fled, a christened maiden remained in her place.  Words came to the
lips that had been dumb, dews of tenderness bathed the eyes that had
been dry as those of a sandstone statue in the Theban desert....

"Dearest--beloved--best! ... Oh! shame that I should have dreamed of
doubting you! ... There is some great reason for this
decision--something terrible behind this haste of yours.  What, I may
not know now!--one day all will be explained to me! ... Until
then"--she rose and kissed the portrait--"until then I will trust
you--who have never deceived me....  I will write to you as you would
wish me to this very night.  Now I must pack, and then go down to
Monica....  How to answer if she should question! ... but no, she
never will!"

Dismissing the phantom of Charles, faceless and bodiless, but none
the less terrible, she flew at the locker--pulled out the three
drawers--stripped the row of regulation dress-pegs.  Brushing,
smoothing, and folding, she even sang as she worked....  Presently a
bell rang twice.  It was yet vibrating where it hung, on the
passage-landing at the dormitory stair-head, when Juliette passed on
her way to the guest-parlor.  Monica was waiting there.




IX

A tall slight figure in the plain black, tight-fitting gown of a
novice, made with a little cape covering the upper arm.  A sweet
plain face with eyes of hazel brown, framed in a close white cap with
three rows of gophered frills, and there you have Monica, the chosen
friend of the fiery Juliette.

"She has not three ideas!  How can you think so much of her?" a
jealous rival is reported to have said.

Juliette retorted with a lightning riposte:

"Possibly no more than three, but they are good ones!"  She marked
them off on her tiny fingers.  "First, to serve God....  Again,--to
serve her friends....  Once more--to help her enemies! ... If not,
how is it that she spent two hours yesterday, working with you at
that F major fugue in Bach's Book of Forty-eight? ... Has not that
stopped you the whistle? ... I have eyes in my head, see you well?
_Pour tout dire_--you are an ingrate, you!"

"See you well!" could be a slogan on occasion, a blood-chilling note
heralding the shock of battle.  But it came now in the softest of
dove-notes, as they hurried to meet each other, clasped hands, and
kissed.

"Dear one, I am so glad!  See you well, we have a whole half-hour to
spend together....  And there is so much to tell you that I know not
where to begin." ... She drew back frowning a little, vexed that
Monica was not alone.  "I entreat your pardon! ... I did not know you
entertained a visitor....  It is best that I retire....  I fear I
am.... how do you say? ... very much in the road!"

Monica explained, holding the big red hand of an awkward young man in
a shaggy greatcoat.

"You are not in the way, dear--and this is not a visitor!  Let me
introduce my brother, of whom you have heard.  Caro, this is my
friend, Mademoiselle de Bayard."

The shaggy young man, blushing savagely to the tips of his ears and
the roots of his flaming hair, made a clumsy inclination, and offered
the large red paw to Mademoiselle, who gravely inspected it, drawing
down her upper lip, folding her own infinitesimal hands before her
narrow waist, but made no movement to take it.

"He has angry eyes, with curious amber _taches_ in them, ..." she
thought.  "And he looks dusty as a voyager after a long travel....
Not _bien tenu_ as a gentleman should be....  Living with Germans in
Germany--he has become indifferent to the _petits soins_ of the
toilet.  I would put the hand in the fire rather than tell
Monica!--but, for me, I find him horrible.  What is he saying?  One
would expect from a being so clumsy and so shaggy, not merely speech,
but a roar!"

Yet the voice was fresh and rather pleasant, as he replied to
Monica's interested questions.  Had he had a good journey? ... How
long had he been in London? ... Three days, and never let her know?
... Why not? ... Had he dined early, or lunched, and if not--he had
been understood to mumble a negative,--would he not have something
now?  Tea and sandwiches--Sister Boniface would cut the latter in a
minute.  It was only three o'clock.  Benediction wasn't until
four--there would be heaps of time....

The mumbled refusals grew faint.  Monica smiled her triumph.  Intent
on hospitality she hurried out of the parlor, saying with a backward
glance, and a smile halved between sulky Carolan and somber Juliette:
"Sit down!--talk to each other ... I'll soon be back again!..."

But the sound of the closing door smote the shaggy youth with a dumb
palsy and transformed Mademoiselle de Bayard into the semblance of a
large mechanical doll in black merino.

"Stiff, pale, proud little creature!" Carolan mentally termed her.
It occurred to him that, attired in a brocade Court dress over a
hooped farthingale, crowned with a wig of stiffened ringlets adorned
with lace and ribbons and diamond powder, with a fan in one of those
rigid little hands, she might have sat to Velasquez as a child
Infanta.  Or, upholstered and decked in Moorish finery, posed as one
of the female midgets in the royal group of the Familia.  Whatever
Velasquez might have thought, she was priggish, prudish, dull,
doltish....  Obstinate, too, with that long, deeply-channeled upper
lip.  And how persistently she kept those long, thick, uncurling
lashes down.  One wondered rather what might be the color of the eyes
so concealed?  Black or brown?  Or--one had had a gleam of blue when
for an instant she had looked at one.  Nobody cared--but perhaps they
were blue?

She made no movement to sit down, nor did she indicate a desire that
he should seat himself.  She flickered her somber eyelids for an
instant, and the eyes seemed inky-black.  Burnt holes in a blanket,
the observer brutally termed them, lifting his mental gaze to the
china-blue orbs of his ideal, the colossal
Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde.

In contempt of the prim puppet in the black merino he found himself
adding inches to his loved one's height.  Or perhaps it was to keep
himself from madly shouting to Monica to tell them to hurry up with
that tray....

When you have pawned your jacket and waistcoat for two-and-eightpence
early on Wednesday, and have dined on a sausage and mashed for
threepence, supped on a drink of water from a pump in a livery-stable
yard....  When the bed at a coffee-house has cost you a shilling,
breakfast of burned-bread coffee and roll, threepence, and you have
spent twopence on a paper collar, your remaining capital stands at a
shilling, and by three o'clock on Thursday, if you have not ventured
to break into this, you are beginning to return to the savage of the
Earlier Stone Age.  Who, supposing his neighbor to be gnawing a lump
of gristle when his own stomach was clamorous, dropped in upon the
banquet armed with a flint axe, and possessed himself of the coveted
_bonne-bouche_.

P. C. Breagh was frankly astonished at the savage voracity of his own
impulses.  It did not occur to him that his nerves--he had always
jeered at men who had talked of their nerves--had sustained a
tremendous shock, and that this was the inevitable reaction.  His
laboriously crammed scientific knowledge had never yet been called
upon to account for his own bodily sensations--unless in the case of
a jammer headache--diagnosed as the result of too many beers
overnight.  At any rate he was not hungry now,--and the room with its
stiff row of chairs, its high-molded ceiling, its dingy blue
distempered walls, hung with engravings of Popes and Cardinals, Roman
views, and Scriptural oil-paintings, began to heave and surge like
the decks of the evil-smelling, second-rate passenger-steamer that
had brought him third-class from Ostend.  He thought of that old man
with the shattered skull sprawling among his bloody papers, and knew
that in another moment he should--horror of horrors! despite the
presence of yonder speechless Immobility in the fiddle-bodied black
frock and medaled blue neck ribbon--either faint or be violently sick.

He chose the first alternative, for the whole room, with its faded
gilt mirrors, its album-laden tables, its formal rows of chairs
skirting the wainscot, the little mats in front of them, and the
beeswaxed floor on which with growing difficulty he maintained a
perpendicular position, melted away from about and from under him,
letting him sink down, down ... into bottomless, boundless abysses of
intangible gray mist....

Out of which, after an interval of a hundred years or three minutes,
he emerged sufficiently to say in a husky whisper:

"It's nothing!  I'm all----"

And then be swallowed up again.  Coming to the surface in another æon
or so to ask, with a wince of pain:

"Did the old fellow shoot me in the head?  It--hurts like the
dickens!"

And to receive the answer in a cool little silvery voice like the
playing of a fountain in a mossy basin at the end of a green alley,
or the trickle of a brook through lush grasses and forget-me-not beds.

"You knocked the floor with it when you made to fall so suddenly!"
Something cool and light touched his aching forehead, and the voice
went on again: "It does not bleed, no! but there will certainly be
one big bump there!"

"One bump....  Feels like one-and-twenty!" P. C. Breagh muttered,
adding, with a heave and struggle that brought him into a sitting
posture: "Help me up, whoever you are! ... Not all at once....
_Donnerwetter!_ how giddy I am!  Try again in a minute! ... Here!
... Give me hold of your fist!"

The silvery voice said, with a liquid tremble in it that might have
been laughter or shyness:

"But I do not comprehend--_feesth_!  Permit that I offer you the
hand....  I am so very strong, me!"

"Strong, eh?" P. C. Breagh said vacantly, being still absorbed in the
effort to remember where he was.  He was certainly sitting up on a
shiny, cold and slippery floor, leaning back against something warm
and fragrant and soft, but he had not the least notion as to the
nature of the support afforded him, nor did he associate the
ownership of the voice with any person previously met.

"Strong!..." he repeated, and yawned, and could not leave off
yawning.  "_Physical exhaustion, fatigue, and lack of food,_" he
mentally diagnosed, and found that, when his eyes had left off
blinking and watering, the room was coming back.  There were the
Popes, Cardinals, and views of Roman Basilicas; there the
oil-paintings of sacred subjects--there the dingy gilt mirrors, the
round center-table with books upon it, the oval one with an inkstand
and nothing more,--the formal rows of chairs, instantly reviving the
impression of a Convent parlor ... and stimulating him to rise, after
some slips and sprawls and flounders, and stand upright on the
beeswaxed boards, smiling rather stupidly and clutching something
small and soft and sentient, for it fluttered in his big inclosing
palm as a captive titmouse or robin might have done....
_Donnerwetter!_ it was the hand whose aid he had asked a moment
before in his extremity....  A child's....  No!--a girl's....  Who
was the girl? ...

The truth burst on him then that it was to the mechanical doll, the
stiff, pale, proud, absurd little creature, the Infanta of the
drooping eyelids, the Moorish pigmy, he owed the help the little hand
had given.  The silvery, sweet voice was hers, and against her he had
leaned as he sat on the floor gathering in his scattered
faculties....  The light touch that had visited his aching forehead,
when she had said it did not bleed, had soothed him like the contact
of a flower.  The sweetness of the voice was in his ears again....

"Will you not sit down?  You are not strong, and should manage your
forces.  A gentleman to faint like that I have never before seen!
Your sister will be grieved that you----"

"You are not to tell her!"  He dropped heavily into the chair she had
brought, and made a feebly-emphatic blow at the table near which she
had set it.  "Promise me! ... I--I must ask you to be good enough....
Who has gone and unbuttoned my coat?"




X

The pitiable secret the shaggy garment had concealed, the absence of
jacket and waistcoat, bringing his hidden poverty into horrible
relief, the dinginess of the shirt of two days' wear, the deceptive
nature of the paper collar purchased at an outlay of twopence, had
been revealed by some traitorous hand during his unguarded weakness
of a moment back.  The color rushed back to his haggard young face in
flood, as with shaky fingers he wedded the big horn buttons to their
buttonholes, and felt about his neck to find it wet....  Juliette had
said to herself that he had angry eyes.  They were tigerish as they
flamed at her.  Then the yellow flame died out of them and they were
nothing but gray and miserable.  He said brokenly:

"I--beg your pardon!  I must seem the last thing out in the way of a
brute to you.  I had--fainted or something!--I've been through a lot
of late!  And you meant to--be kind, I'm sure...."

He had thought her a mere child in size, but her personal dignity
lent her height and presence.  Her great eyes met his full, and they
were deeply blue as scillas in May, with great black pupils and
velvety-black bands about the irises.  She said in an icy little
voice:

"Sir, it is customary in these days to instruct young ladies in the
knowledge of imparting medical aid to the sick or wounded.  A moment
since I saw you fall to the floor!  I lanced myself to your side!--I
debuttoned your paletot--sprinkled on your forehead water from that
vase upon the table,"--she indicated the ornament with an
infinitesimal forefinger,--"and in a few minutes I have the relief to
behold you sufficiently recovered to demand if a man has shooted you?
... Naturally, I do not mean to be unkind!  But the promise not to
speak of this to Mademoiselle, your sister, see you well?--I cannot
give it!  Young ladies"--there was an appalling stateliness about the
tone and manner of this delivery, worthy of a mistress of
deportment--"young _ladies_ do not have secrets with strange young
gentlemen!  And Monica is my dear friend, not you!"

"Then if she is so much a friend of yours, you would wish to spare
her knowledge of things certain to shock and grieve her.  You would
not like to have her anxious and worried about what she couldn't
help, would you?"  His eyes constrained and besought.  His voice was
humbly entreating....

Juliette recognized the cunning in this appeal.  She lowered her
little pointed chin and leveled her thick straight eyelashes at the
speaker.  "Yes!" the chin said: "No!" the eyelashes replied.  Thus
encouraged, P. C. Breagh had an inspiration.

"But if I trust you!--you look as if you could be trusted...."

From her little neck in its plain white frill to the cloud of dusky
hair that crowned her, she flushed rosy as Alpine snows at sunset.
Did he mean to insult, or ingratiate, this overbearing, shaggy youth?
She said, with delicate reproof, completely lost upon his bluntness:

"My father has honored me with his confidence, as long as I can
remember, sir."

"Then I'll risk mine with you!" said P. C. Breagh.

"Not risk!"  She had lost her glow, the sapphires of her eyes were
shadowed by the blackness of the lowered lashes.  "Do not say risk,
for that is to gamble.  See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I
will not be trusted at all!"

He understood, in part, that he had wounded, and awkwardly begged her
pardon, ending: "And show that you forgive me by letting me tell you
that I wouldn't have my sister know, for the world!"  He got up and
went to one of the white-curtained, ground-glass-filled windows, that
masked the outlook upon Kensington Square, and said still more
awkwardly:

"You see--you must have already seen from my togs--that I am a
beggar.  I came back from Germany three days ago to find myself one.
I was to receive a fortune from the hands of trustees, and I found
that their firm had gone bankrupt.  The elder partner had committed
suicide--the younger had shot the moon.  My thousands in his
pockets!"  He ground his teeth.  "And if I live--and ever meet that
fellow!--he'll pay me in inches of skin!"

She said, and the silvern voice had the sweetness of Cordelia's:

"I am so very sorry!  Could you not prevail upon this dishonest
gentleman to restore to you your property?"

P. C. Breagh said, with a flash of white teeth in his blunt-featured
freckled face:

"I might, if he had been considerate enough to mention where I could
find him! ... Meanwhile..."  He shrugged his strong young shoulders
in rather a despondent way.

"Meanwhile you are without a home ... and without money?"

He nodded, biting fiercely on his jutting underlip.  "Just now!  But
by-and-by----"

She persisted.

"Without money and--starving!  Surely, starving! and that was why you
fainted! ... And I, _mon Dieu!_--I have been blind and stupid....
_Je ne me doutais de rien_!  Forgive me, I beg of you!"

Her small face was all white and pinched and working.  Sobs choked
her voice; she struck her little bosom--she wrung the tiny hands in
anguish....  And it was all real.  You could not doubt Juliette's
sincerity.  And though his manhood was sufficiently new to revolt at
commiseration, still, it was not unpleasant to know that one's
misfortunes had pierced the bucklered pride of the little Infanta,
and wrung tears from the most wonderful eyes he had ever seen.  And
what was she saying?

"Monsieur Breagh, it is a misfortune of the most grand that you are a
man and I a woman!  Otherwise it would be so easy to say to you
this....  Me, I am for the moment rich.  I could--if you would accord
me the permission?--relieve these pressing necessities....  Let me
know where a letter will readily find you....  Do not, I entreat you,
be angry that I ask this!"

But he was angry.  His broad stripe of meeting red eyebrows came
loweringly down over eyes that had the tigerish flame in them.  His
face burned and he clenched his hands until the knuckles showed out
white upon their sunburned backs.  He tried to speak and could not,
so choking was his indignation.  To be asked to borrow from a
girl--his sister's schoolmate, added one last dash of wormwood to the
brimming cup of bitterness.  Unlucky P. C.  Breagh!

"I'm uncommonly obliged, but decent men--in this country--don't do
that sort of thing!  Even Frenchmen might call it caddish!" he choked
out at last.

Her eyes blazed murderously, a savage dusky crimson dyed the small
white face that had looked at him with such pitiful entreaty.  She
did not tower, she contracted--she crouched like a savage little cat
ready to spring and rend him; her muscles grew visibly tense under
her transparent skin.  He could hear the sharp hiss of her intaken
breath, and see her lips writhe in the struggle to control utterance
that seemed on the point of breaking from them.  When she spoke, it
was in a low clear whisper, more piercing, it seemed to her unlucky
auditor, than any shriek.

"Sir, when you say to me that even a Frenchman might find despicable
the deed an Englishman would shrink from as a stain upon his
honor,--you insult my country of France, and my brave father; and the
noble gentleman who will be my husband soon! ... It is fortunate for
you that M. Charles is not here, see you well?  Brave as a lion, he
is a master of the sword.  But enough!--I was mistaken and I have
been justly humiliated....  Permit that I wish you a very good
afternoon!"

She curtsied to the miserable P. C. Breagh with crushing ceremony,
turned, and had swept from the room before he could even reach the
door.  It shut in his face with a deliberate gentleness that was more
final than a slam would have been....

"I've done it, by golly!" said P. C. Breagh.

Just after this lofty, dignified fashion had
Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde quitted the scene of many an
imaginary interview.  That a being so small and frail should assume
the airs of these heroines tickled even while it angered him.  A
moment more he glowered and fumed, cursing the Fate that had dealt
him another set-back, and then ... the tinkle of crockery heralded
the return of Monica with Sister Boniface and a tray, satisfactorily
laden with a stout brown teapot, bread and butter, home-made
preserves, and a dish of somewhat solid ham-sandwiches, the welcome
sight of which drove away the dark blue devils and restored his
cheeriness again.  He could go a long time on one full meal, he told
himself, as he perpetrated a surprising onslaught on the eatables and
thirstily swallowed cup after cup of convent tea.

Replete at length, he leaned back in his chair, conscious--so
overwhelming was the sensation of fullness after his protracted
fast--of feeling like a boa-constrictor who had swallowed his
blanket.  He longed to sleep, the continual battle with recurrent
yawns was becoming painful; and yet you are mistaken if you suppose
that this young man did not love his gentle step-sister, and was not
glad at heart to be once more in Monica's company.  But Brother Ass,
the body, ridden fast and far by the turbulent spirit and the eager
mind, belabored by the cudgel of Fate until his solid ribs were
cracking within his shaggy hide, wanted repose more than social
converse.  Carolan's eyelids were closing under the stream of
Monica's eager talk.  His head was nodding--his mouth had fallen
ajar--a faint snore was on the point of issuing from the organ
immediately above it--when he started as broad awake as though a wasp
had stung him....  Monica was speaking of Juliette....

"I am so glad that you have met her!--yet sorry, too, because she is
leaving us so soon now.  Is she not sweet?--with those grave airs,
and those angelic eyes under determined eyebrows, and that shy wild
smile..." thus Monica prattled on.  To stop her--or to prevent
himself from giving her his candid opinion of her lauded idol, he
inquired whether she did not find him handsome, and had her reply:

"Not a bit! rather ugly than otherwise; but I love your face, and
always shall, Caro!  Why, you have a mustache already!" she cried.

He blushed as Monica jumped up for a nearer inspection, to discover
that the close sprinkling of dark-brown freckles on the egg-smooth
young surface of his upper lip had deceived the sisterly observation.

"The mustache will come," Monica said with a smile, "and then you
will begin to be more of a dandy."

He fancied that her look betrayed a shade of disappointment.  "No
wonder! such a beast as I must look!" he thought.  But he said with
rather a clumsy air of indifference:

"I daresay my clothes are a bit shabby, perhaps more than a bit!
But, you see, I've been knocking about on the rail--and aboard
steamers--and so on."

"Still, you could be--what Juliette would call more _soigné_."  There
was a little accent of sisterly rebuke in the words.  "And I have
talked to her so much about you----"

"That you're afraid she'll chaff you, now she has beheld the wonder!
If she did I shouldn't be surprised! ... And if I'd known you wanted
me to turn up a thundering swell, I'd have polished myself up a bit.
My hair is too long, of course....  But--most British fellows run
shaggy after a year or two at a German University."

He spoke as easily and naturally as was possible, with a lump in the
throat embraced by the paper collar, and a savage pain tearing at his
heart.

She said:

"It is a bargain then, and I shall see my old Caro looking as he
ought to look, next time he comes here! ... Tell me, when will next
time be?"

He stuttered, inwardly writhing:

"I had no idea you'd mind the sort of--togs a fellow went about in!
You, who are going--you told me in your last letter! to take a vow of
poverty and all the rest!..."

She laughed and patted the brown hand.

"But you aren't going to take a vow of poverty....  You will be
independent....  You will have everything--I hope you will have
everything; that goes to make Life pleasant, and all the other things
that make it--precious....  I am very ambitious for you, Carolan!"

He laughed rather roughly.

"Ambition in the cap and cape of a postulant!  What would the
Mistress of the Novices say to that?"

The face framed in the triple row of white frills was very pure and
tender.

"She would say that there are more kinds of ambition, than one.  I am
ambitious that my brother should be spoken of among men--as a man who
in the whole course of his career was never once ashamed to own
himself a Catholic, and to prove not only in words, but in deeds--his
loyalty to his Master in the face of the world!  You understand me,
don't you?"

He answered her in an embarrassed, awkward way, and with a look that
evaded hers.

"Of course!  You mean--you'd like me to be the kind of fellow who
goes regularly to Mass, and receives the Blessed Sacrament on all the
Feasts of Obligation!  Well, I can't boast of being quite as
scrupulous as that!  But at any rate I have--ringed in with the
late-comers--at Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide...."  He added,
"Not that I should have been thought priggish if I'd gone oftener....
Of course the bulk of the students at Schwärz-Brettingen were
Lutheran Protesants.  But about one-third were Catholics, I should
think."

"And were all of them late-comers--ringing in at the last minute?"

"I can't say that.  When one did turn out for early Mass one found
the churches--there were three of 'em--packed full."

"Ah! ... Where are you staying?" she asked him in a changed tone.

He faltered, sick at heart at having to lie to her.




XI

"I--I haven't got the address on me just now!  By George, that's just
... Ha, ha, ha!"

"What is the joke?  Do tell me!" she urged, puzzled by the mirthless
bark of laughter.

He could not have explained.  His Irish sense of humor had been
tickled to realize that in actual fact he did carry his address about
him.  Did not the shabby old frieze greatcoat constitute his hotel,
chambers and club?  To change the subject he began to question her
experiences in the Novitiate.  She looked happy, he admitted.  He did
not hide that her decision to take the Veil had been a surprise.

"You see, you'd always been such a jolly girl," he told her.  "Such a
stunning companion--I'd never have expected it of you."

Her bright laugh rang through the room.

"Dear boy, do you suppose that nuns are dismal things, or indifferent
to pleasant companionship?  You should hear us laugh and chatter at
Recreation.  Perhaps because the time for fun is limited, as the time
for other things--we enjoy that half-hour's freedom all the more.
Not"--her smile did not leave her, but it changed in
expression,--"not that I did not have my miserable hours.  For the
matter of that I have them still!"

He got up and went over to the hearth-side, where a tiny gas-fire
made pretense of cheerfulness.

"I never thought it was all jam in the Novitiate.  A fellow I knew
who had wanted to be a Carthusian monk--and found it impossible to
stick out the preliminaries!--hinted as much to me."

"I suppose," she said calmly, "that he could not submit to
the--necessary experiences that lead to the final breaking of the
will."

"Breaking of the will!"  He kicked the old-fashioned fender savagely.
"What do they do to break yours, in Heaven's name?"

"What is done is done in Heaven's name," she said, "and that is why
one can submit cheerfully.  But my first weeks in the noviceship were
cloudlessly happy."  She laughed a little.  "I thought it was always
going to be like that!"

"I see! ... I twig! ... They made much of you in the beginning...."
He gritted his teeth and turned his face away.

"Perhaps they did! ... I remember I had all the nicest things to do,
and nobody minded....  I was allowed to dust the High Altar, change
the flowers in the vases, and help the Sister-Sacristan brush and
fold the vestments away.  And one day I was permitted to wash the
lunette of the monstrance.  It was a wonderful experience.  One could
understand how the Magdalene must have felt when she wiped the Sacred
Feet."

He was silent, for she had soared to heights beyond him.

"Perhaps it made me proud, for next day I was set to tidy the
linen-room presses.  I worked for some weeks there, darning and
mending and folding.  Then I was sent to the Refectory."  The smile
was only in her eyes now.  "I liked laying the long tables, but I
hated washing dirty plates and dishes, and I simply loathed cleaning
knives and forks."

"I should think so!  Housemaid's duty!  I understand now what you
meant a minute back! ... By George! ...  'Miserable hours!' ..."

Her deep eyes rested on him calmly:

"And after I am clothed--after I have received the habit--I shall
most likely go on having them!  I daresay I shall have them after I
have taken the Veil."

He kicked the fender again, his hands shoved deep into his empty
pockets, and felt the shilling, sole coin remaining to him, burn
against his aching ribs.  He would have given ten years of life to
have been able to tell her that a home with him was ready and
waiting,--in case she shrank from the final plunge.  He made a great
effort and groaned out:

"But that won't be for two years to come.  And things may happen--who
knows!"

"Oh!  I pray," she said with a sudden flush, "that I need not wait
two years!"

Her eagerness lifted a load that had been crushing him.  In sheer
relief he began to stammer:

"What a blessed idiot I am!  I didn't understand ... I thought you
... I believed you....  Of course you don't do the dirty work now.
That was only for a time, at the beginning.  Well, I'm glad!  I'd
hate to think of my sister tackling servants' duties, anyway!  All
right!  Well, what are you on to now, eh?  Back at dusting the Altar
and doing the flowers?"

"No.  That is for others.--There are many others, and each of them
must have a turn at the pleasant things.  When you have lived in the
community only a short time, you begin to understand that....  And
when you have lived in it only a little longer you learn that between
the pleasant duties and the unpleasant duties there is no difference,
whatever.  Nothing being done that is not done for God.  When I was
scrubbing the desks in the Little Class to-day,--there are seventy
children, and the tiny ones come in with muddy boots from the garden
in wet weather, and splash the ink over everything,--I was dusting
the Altar....  When I was washing the slates I was washing the Feet
of Christ.  It is no matter what we do as long as it is nothing to be
ashamed of--and is done with a right intention! ... The lowest
service counts as the highest in the sight of Almighty God.  It is
one of the great mysteries of Faith that this should be so.  But it
is so! ...  There's the first bell for Benediction!"

It was too late now.  But even as she rose with that wonderful look
in the calm face framed in by the triple row of little starched
frills, and took his hand and led him to the door, P. C. Breagh
realized that he ought from the first to have told the truth to her.

The parlor door led them into the corridor upon the boarders' side.
She guided him along it, left him at the entrance of the chapel,
pressed his hand, whispered "Good-bye for now!" and vanished through
a curtained archway on the right hand, communicating with the
cloister, possibly.

He entered the chapel.  A small portion of the nave, near the west
door, was open to the public.  Some dozen worshipers, chiefly elderly
ladies, knelt or sat upon the rush-bottomed chairs.  Beyond, a high,
wrought-iron grille partitioned off the capacious choir, separated
from the cloisters upon either hand by the tall carved screen that
backed the rows of stalls.  And the dying daylight of the January
afternoon shone through high windows, stained in hues tender as
flower-petals or brilliant as jewels, depicting the various scenes in
the life of the Virgin Mother of Christ.

The second bell had not yet rung for Benediction as Carolan bent the
knee and slipped into a chair near the central gate of the grille.
The place was full of the presence and perfume of flowers, and the
spice of incense burned at the morning Mass.  Tapers tall and short
blazed on the High Altar, and a nun in purple habit and creamy veil
knelt at a faldstool, absorbed in adoration of the Throned Mystery of
Faith.  Within the space of a Paternoster the second bell rang.  The
choir-sister rose, knelt in adoration, moved her stool carefully
aside, and went out by a side-door in the sanctuary.  And a sound as
of many moving waters began to grow upon the ear.  A curtain was
drawn that masked an archway upon the farther side of the grille upon
the right side: there was the invariable convent signal of a
hand-clap, and two girlish shapes, in long white muslin veils over
dark uniform dresses, entered together; and went to the bottom of the
broad aisle between the rows of benches, moving sedately side by
side.  One wore a pale blue, the other a crimson ribbon supporting a
silver medal.  One was of solid Teutonic build, with magnificent
plaits of golden hair, vivid red and white coloring, and rather
stiff, if dignified, bearing.  The other--a slender creature of
stature almost childlike, yet with womanly coils of duskiness shot
through with a tortoiseshell arrow, seemed insignificant as she
walked beside her stately white-veiled mate.  And yet, it was not
walking, but gliding, hovering, floating ... such airy grace of
movement as P. C. Breagh had never dreamed
of,--Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde having covered the ground with the
magnificent indolence of a glacier, or traversed it with the
overwhelming rush of an avalanche, when the exigencies of some
imaginary scene of passion had compelled her to "fly from her
conqueror's presence," or "impetuously gain his side."  Now for the
first time her inventor found himself wavering....  Was his heroic
ideal too Titanic, too colossal, too big and too clumsy?  Would it
not be just as well to shorten her by half a dozen superfluous
inches--reduce her superabundant flesh?  And if at the same time one
were to darken her dandelion tresses?--tone down the staring
china-blue of her eyes into----


What was the color?  The blue of the spring flower or the blue of the
sapphire? ... You never knew until she looked at you ... and then you
weren't certain ... you kept wanting her to look again!  Meek or
tigress-like, in whatever mood you found her, you would always be
wanting Juliette to look, and look again.


The revelation of his monstrous folly, the knowledge of his
faithlessness came in the instant of recognition, hit him like a
seventh wave and bowled him off his mental legs.

Before he had recovered, the white-veiled hovering figure had
vanished.  The aisle had noiselessly filled with a great procession
of similar figures, standing motionless, waiting, two by two.  There
was a second clap of hands,--and the white-veiled column knelt in
adoration.  At a third signal they rose and slowly filed into their
seats.  And a second double line of younger girls, the Middle Class,
also white-veiled and white-gloved, formed in the place of them, and
the orderly, impressive maneuver was repeated by these.  Little
children took their places, and did as their seniors.  A noble
voluntary burst from the organ in the high-placed loft, and the
purple-habited, creamy-veiled choir-sisters poured in and took their
stalls, and the lay-sisters and novices followed, filling the great
choir to overflowing, as the door of the vestry was opened by a
sweet-faced child in a red cassock and white cotta, and the vested
priest, a scholarly-looking, gray-haired man, came in and went to his
place.  And the strains from the organ changed, and a voice fresh and
sweet as a thrush's, passionless-pure as an angel's, began to chant
_O Salutaris_,--and something like a sob broke from P. C. Breagh's
throat, and hot tears came crowding, and one at least fell.

He had been shipwrecked, and here was a little green-palmed islet of
peace to rest on--his only for a moment, but a moment in which to
gather strength, and breath to face the raging seas again.  His mood
changed.  He was glad he had not told Monica that he was homeless,
half-clothed, and all but penniless in big, black, brutal, noisy
London, and would have to water cab-horses, or sweep a crossing, or
clean boots to keep alive.

Ah, what was it Monica had said?  Without her knowing it those words
had been somehow meant for Carolan.  Let's see--how did they go? ...
Something this way....

"_It is no matter what we do, as long as it is nothing to be ashamed
of, and is done with a right intention.  The lowest service counts as
the highest in the sight of Almighty God.  It is one of the great
mysteries of Faith that this should be so.  But it is so!_"

"I--see!"

He had sheltered his shamed and burning face in his big hands.  But
with that ray of inward light had come courage and resourcefulness.
He lifted his head bravely now and drew in a deep chestful of the
sweet, warm, pleasant air.

"Perhaps the money was spoiling me!--making me look to it instead of
to myself--and I've been stripped and pitched into deep water as the
big fellows used to do to us little chaps, when we funked.  Perhaps
this is for the best--and I'll find it so one day.  Perhaps I can
make up for some of the caddish things I've done--refusing that
girl's offered help so savagely among 'em--by taking this thing well!
Facing what there is to face--and putting up with what I've got to.
Well, I'll have a shot at it!" said P. C. Breagh to P. C. Breagh.
"I'll do nothing that I'm ashamed of--and be ashamed of nothing
that's honest; I'll labor for my daily bread--and for my nightly
bed,--with these hands and shoulders,--if nobody will pay me for my
brains!--And what I do I'll do cheerfully.  Shall I kick at sweeping
a crossing, when He was a carpenter?"

It seemed to him that he had not prayed, and yet he had without
knowing it.  The Benediction seemed to fall on him like dew.  He went
out by the west door with the small congregation, and found himself
in the foggy London square within sound of the roaring traffic of the
London streets, with a return of the old hideous shrinking.  A
sensation paralleled by that of the shipwrecked castaway who has
found brief resting-place upon the tiny coral atoll and must perforce
commit himself, upon his crazy raft of planks and hencoops, to the
shark-infested, treacherous Pacific seas again.




XII

He strolled up a short street, and looked for and found a roomy,
double bow-fronted house of warm old red brick, with huge capacious
areas.  "Vanity Fair" had been written there, he knew, perhaps
"Esmond" too, though he was not sure.  He took off his hat to the
memory of the magician, and wondered where his other idol, the still
living author of the "Cloister and the Hearth," and "Never Too Late
to Mend" might be run to earth, and made up his mind to see Dickens's
grave in Westminster Abbey on the morrow, whether it cost sixpence,
or whether it did not....  And then he wavered, sixpence, as we know,
being the moiety of his capital; and then he remembered that
to-morrow could only be reached by the bridge of to-night.  He walked
very fast for some distance, trying to exorcise the demons that this
thought evoked, and,--blinded by their buzzing and stinging--was in
Piccadilly before he knew.  The high railings of the Green Park, and
the foggy solitude of the gravel-walks between the wintry lawns,
tempted him to turn in and rest upon a seat a while, for he was still
somewhat giddy and shaky, and the bump so confidently prophesied by
the Infanta had appeared upon his brow.

He took off the old felt wideawake and stared at Piccadilly,
brilliant with the paroquet-colors of passing omnibuses, green and
royal blue, chocolate and white-and-gold.  Behind the shining windows
of the great Clubs, the members' heads, gleamingly bald, or affluent
of hair and whiskers, alternately appeared and vanished.  He caught
brief passing glimpses of white-bosomed waiters, ... the twinkle of
gilt buttons on livery coats....  Beer-drays, driven by burly
red-faced men, frequently in shirt-sleeves, went by with a whiff of
malt, and the thunder of heavy hoofs.  Vans of business-houses passed
with a clang of bells.  Victorias and landaus with muffled, and
furred, and veiled ladies in them; shut-up broughams, madly-daring
velocipedists on the machine of the era, a giant wheel followed by a
pigmy one, made fleeting pictures on the retina of P. C. Breagh.  And
the double river of traffic, and the eastward and westward-flowing
stream of pedestrians went by without a break in them.  Gas-lamps
began to make islands of yellow light upon the fog, but showed no
dwindling in their numbers.  He wondered if they would go on like
this all night?  And then some one came up and sat down on the other
end of the seat rather heavily, and the slight resultant shock and
jar brought round P. C. Breagh's head.

He saw the thick-set, rather lax and round-shouldered figure of a man
of middle age, dressed in a suit of tweeds patterned in giant checks
of black and white and gray, the _dernier cri_ in masculine
morning-wear, had the observer but known it.  His hat, a low-crowned
chimney-pot in hard gray felt, was tilted backward, his hair, of a
pale tow-color, tufted out from beneath the hat in a way that cried
for the attention of the barber; his whiskers, and mustache, of the
same shade as the hair, were raggedly in need of the shears.  He wore
a buttonhole-bouquet composed of a pink camellia with Neapolitan
violets, and pale lemon kid gloves, and sucked the carved ivory knob
of an ebony stick he carried, until,--upon his neighbor's looking
round as above recorded,--he took it from a somewhat lax and swollen
mouth, and observed that it was a nice afternoon.  Adding, as P. C.
Breagh made a sound which might have been assent or denial:

"If it is affernoon?  Without my fellow to post me, I'm apt to be
wrong about time.  Not that that's remarable.  Lots of people the
same, don't you know?  Nothing extra--nothing ex--oh, damn!"

A covert anxiety--and a very visible tremulousness were combined in
the speaker's manner.  His large watery blue eyes were painfully
vague and blurred, with distended pupils that looked uneven; his
gestures were uncertain, and his words, well chosen enough, and
uttered with the tone and accent usually distinctive of a gentleman,
came haltingly from a tongue that seemed to be too large for its
owner's mouth:

"You don't regard it as extra ... Stop a minute!"  A pause ensued,
during which the vague-eyed gentleman waited, clutching his stick
with both hands, and holding his swollen mouth ajar.  And when he
shut the mouth to shake his head, and looked at P. C. Breagh in the
act of doing this, the perspiration shone upon his puffy cheeks and
stood in beads upon his reddened forehead, as though it had been July
instead of a foggy afternoon in January, and the pink-bordered
cambric handkerchief with which he wiped his worried face became,
after this usage, a very rag.  And a queer, unwillingly-yielded-to
sense of commiseration prompted Carolan to suggest:

"'Extraordinary' was the word you wanted, wasn't it?"

"Much obliged!  The word, unnoutedly!  'Stror'nary how words do dodge
one on occasion!" returned the uncertain gentleman in the
large-patterned tweeds.  He added, pulling at the ragged light
mustache, with a gloved hand that was decidedly shaky: "I don't know
that it matters parricurarly--but I'd prefer you to know that I'm not
runk!"

"Not--what?..."

"Not runk!" repeated the vague-eyed gentleman emphatically.  "Not
cut, foozled, miffed, fizzed, screwed!  Not that it's oblig--that's
another of the words that perretually queer me!--or incumment on me
to isplain, but I regard it as due to myself, by Gad! that you should
clearly unnerstand the case.  As I said to the manuscript upon the
Bench when the bobby ran me in on Thursday--or was it Friray? ...
Appearances are sally against me, but I have never been a rinking
man!  The doctors have a crajjaw name for my connition, which under
the exissing circ--and that's another of the words that play the
deuce and all with me! ... Look at my westick, buttoned all wrong!"

He slewed round upon the seat, and throwing back the large-patterned,
fashionably cut-away coat, exhibited the garment mentioned, every
buttonhole of which afforded hospitality to a button not its own.
His necktie, the ample, sailor-knotted necktie of the period, was
under his left ear, and his shirt had come unstudded.  Being appealed
to, P. C. Breagh admitted that the existing condition of things left
something to be desired!

"When a man entirely ripends on valets and domessicks," explained his
incoherent neighbor, "a man is apt to be neglected and so on.  As a
marrer of fact I live in that little joppa cottisit!"  He waveringly
pointed to a large, handsome private dwelling with an ornate portico,
situated nearly opposite, and sandwiched between two Clubs.  "An' as
a narrural conquicense of my temorrary irrability to pronounce words
of the most orinary nature, I am----"  He drew an aimless figure in
the muddy gravel with his ivory-topped, ebony stick, and went on with
a weak laugh, "I am absoluly neglected by my own househol'.  My own
children seem ashamed or afray of me--all but Little
Foxhall--splendid little chap is Little Foxhall!  But his mother--my
wife----"  He broke off to say--"You will escuse my touching on these
priva' matters in conversation with a perfec' stranger.  I am quite
conscience I trepsass against the orinary usages of propriety,
especially in speaking of my wife! ... But--the fact is, sir!  I am
most desperately wretched.  Six people imagine me runk--out of every
half-dozen.  While the other six--the irriots whisser it when they
think I'm out of earshock--suppose me to be suffrig from Sofrig of
the Bray!"

He began to tremble and shake, and put his stick between his knees to
hold on to the edge of the seat with his lemon-kidded hands--and
couldn't hold the stick in that position, and it fell, and P. C.
Breagh picked it up and put it back.

"I am murrabliged," said the owner of the stick, "by your kind
attention!"  Something struggled and fought in the vague blue eyes
that he turned upon Carolan,--it seemed as though in another moment
Fear and Terror might have leaped glaring into sight.  "And while I
am boun' to ajopolize for thrussing my privarrafairs upon a
stranger--I feel bound to put the quession; Why should thissorathing
happen to ME?  Goolor'!  I've been no worse than lossa urra fellers!"
He rose up shaking, and shakily sat down again, nearly missing the
bench.

"Bessaran loss of 'em--if you come to that!"  He turned to Carolan,
and the vague eyes were piteous and desperate....  "You see the sort
of chap my luck--my damble luck--has made o' me!  Yet I used to be
envied--envied ... you unnerstand!  I have belonged to the best
regiment in the Brigade of Guards--the devil another!  I have played
the bes' cards, driven the bes' turnouts, smoked the bes' cigars and
had the most stunnin' women!  Do you unnerstand me?--Have!"  He
brought down the uncertain hand in an attempt to strike his knee
emphatically, and missed it; and tried to look as though he had not,
and went on: "And I have belonged to the best gloves, by Gad! an' put
on the clubs with the most celebrarred li'-weights!  And I rode my
steeplechase at York, and romped in first, and they toasted and
speechified me at the Gimcrack dinner.  And I won my Oaks and my
Derby--and led in the winner, with all the cheeple reering;--the
seeple peering--the--Goolor'!  Goolor'!  And the horse was
Gladianor--and the victory was a popular one--and my name was a
household word through the Unirred Kingom.  A household word!..."  He
broke off, trembling and sweating, as the horse might have done after
the race, and put the wavering hand to his head, and turned his empty
blue eyes from Carolan's as though they hurt.  "What was my name?" he
asked himself in a dull, thick, shaky whisper, "Goolor'!  Goolor'!
What was my name? ... That you, Murchison?"

For a decent figure in the irreproachable dark clothing of a servant
out of livery had passed and turned back, and now approached the
bench, eyeing Carolan suspiciously even in the act of uncovering its
well-brushed head, and saying in the smooth accents of servility:

"It is Murchison, your Grace.  It's cold, your Grace, and you've not
got on an overcoat.  Your Grace had best come home now, before your
Grace is missed!..."

"Home?"  His Grace looked mildly from the authoritative Murchison to
the stately "cottage opposite," and one of the uncertain hands in the
pale lemon kid gloves, making as though to pluck at an untrimmed
whisker, found itself imprisoned in a deferential but vigorous grip.

"Home, your Grace!" said Murchison, applying muscular leverage to
raise the inert figure.

"All right.  Prass I better, Murchison!"  He rose to the
perpendicular....  "Wish you a very good evening, sir!"  With a faded
reminiscence of what might have been a courtly manner, he touched his
hat to P. C. Breagh, who returned the farewell greeting, avoiding the
sharp glance of Murchison.  Then valet and master moved off, leaving
a little trail of dialogue behind them:

"You give us the fair slip that time, your Grace!..."

"Perhass I did, Murchison--now you happen to mention it."

"Might have been killed crossing Piccadilly, your Grace, and none of
us the wiser."

"Goolor'!  I'd wish I had, Murchison--if it wasn't for Little
Foxhall!" ... Then in a high, quavering note of eagerness, the plea,
pitiable and ridiculous and pathetic: "I--I say! ... Tell me the
boy'd have minded, Murchison--whass a lie to you, you dam'
smoo'-ranged Ananias!--and I'll give you my nex' week's
sovereign--I'm dead broke now!"

And Murchison and His Grace went away together, the man steering,
with deft guiding touches of the master's elbow, the latter stepping
high and bringing his feet down with a peculiar thump that threw a
light upon the situation in the eyes of P. C. Breagh.  Not softening
of the brain....  _Donnerwetter!_ what were the London doctors
thinking of?  Had none of them read the "Dissertation on Tabes
Dorsalis" of the Herr Doctor Max Baumgarten, published in Berlin only
a twelvemonth previously, and dealing fully with that rare and
curious disease of the nervous system? ... Fibrous degeneration of
the posterior columns of the spinal cord, affecting the patient's
sight, gait, and--in isolated cases--speech and memory.

"I'd like to have got him to let me rap his shins!  Bet you anything
there'd have been total absence of reflex action!  Remember that
peddler in the Nervous Ward of the Augusta Hospital at
Schwärz-Brettingen! ... They cured that chap with spinal injections
and regular massage.  And this man--being a thundering swell and
having the best advice possible--is naturally being treated all
wrong!  Hang it!--how cold I am!  Better be moving!"  He got up and
stamped some warmth into his cold feet and flailed his cold ribs with
his elbows until they tingled again.  He had learned something of the
wretchedness that may sometimes dwell in princely homes, yet be
homeless; and fare delicately from plate of gold and silver, and yet
go hungry,--and lie down to toss and stare through dreadful sleepless
nights on soft luxurious beds.  Therefore the bright reflections of
great fires dancing on the plate-glass windows of the "cottage
opposite" stung him to no comparisons.  "Is it base in me that the
knowledge of the misery of this wealthy nobleman makes me more
contented with my own obscure poverty?" he asked himself, and the
answer was: "_Not if your content does not make you callous to his
woe!_"

"I hope that Little Foxhall would have minded!" he found himself
saying; "and I wish to Heaven Baumgarten could get a chance of doing
something for his father!  I've half a mind to drop a postcard to
him--or write a line to the Herr Professor! ... Stop, though!"

He remembered that he must break into his last remaining shilling to
buy the postcard and pay for the stamps.  Then he swung out through
the Park side-gates, and now he was one of the crowd rolling
Circus-wards, and all the street gas-lamps had been lighted by
certain officials with poles, furnished with hooks for keying the gas
on, and perforated iron sockets filled with blazing tow that had been
soaked in naphtha; thus every shop or restaurant became an Aladdin's
cave of brilliancy, and the down-drawn blinds of the houses and clubs
hid splendor unspeakable--if only one had been able to pull them
up....

Alas! to us who live in these pushful days of Electrical Power
Supply, the glories of the illuminated capital in the year of grace
1870 would appear murky enough.  We should sneer at the stumpy iron
lamp-posts and the chandeliers yet adorned with Early Victorian
crystal glass lusters.  The wood pavement, an invention _de luxe_
economically confined to the West End, and upon the greasy surface of
which bus-horses broke legs as easily as the most aristocratic
thoroughbreds--the loose iron gratings covering basement-lights, and
incidentally presenting man-traps for unwary pedestrians, as
receptacles for stray umbrellas, dead cats, wisps of packing straw,
discarded newspapers and orange-peel--the untrapped gutter-drains and
sewer-vents would awaken our ridicule and evoke our indignation, even
as the displays in the shop windows, especially those of _modistes_,
_couturières_, and tailors, would provoke us to mirth.

The extraordinary little hats, pot-shaped or plate-shaped, worn upon
huge chignons, surmounting cascades of ringlets, _couleur
Impératrice_.  The preposterous frilled _paniers_, the bustles, the
_jupes_ of velvet or plush, flounced to the waist or
kilted--sometimes to mid-leg, displaying boots--such as are worn to
this hour by Principal Boys in Christmas Pantomimes and serio-comic
ladies of the Varsity Stage, who are, we know, Principal Boys in the
pupa, or chrysalis-state.  All these things compel us to hold our
sides when we review them in the illustrated papers of the _Ladies'
Mentor_,--which illuminating periodical, in the dearth of Fashionable
Intelligence from Paris, the hub and center of the modish world, came
to a sudden end in the October of that year, and has defied all
efforts at resuscitation.

Though it is possible that the wearers of these long-vanished
modes--surveying the belles of Belgravia, with their humbler
followers of Brompton and Bayswater,--in the present year of
progress, might be moved to laughter or provoked to wrath.  To-day,
when the ambition of every properly constituted woman is to be shaped
like a golliwog and dressed like a pen-wiper, or to acquire the
sinuosities of a Bayadere and drape the same in cobwebs calculated to
conceal nothing and suggest everything--can we honestly enlarge upon
the bygone improprieties of our aunts, and moan over our mothers'
taste in toilettes?

It was just six when P. C. Breagh crossed Piccadilly Circus and
turned down toward the Haymarket.  Why hurry, he asked himself, when
you have nowhere to go?  The restaurants were filling with diners who
were going to the theaters, the smell of cooked meats made savory the
fogginess.  He shrugged his shoulders, dug his hands deep into his
empty pockets, and tried to whistle as he loafed along.

Misery stalked these West End streets, rampant and clamorous.  A
burly man devoid of legs, shuffling along with his hands in a pair of
woman's clogs, entreated P. C. Breagh in stentorian tones to buy a
tin nutmeg-grater.  A miserable creature, whose sole garment appeared
to be the upper portion of an adult pair of trousers, begged him, in
the professional whine, to spare a penny for the pore orphan boy!  A
dank female, in rusty weeds, stationary by the curb, displaying a
baby and a row of ballads, besought of him, for the love of Gawd! to
pity the unfortunate widow and her starving orphans.

"Buy a ballad, kind genl'man!  On'y a penny--goes to a lovelly
choone!"


  "Ho!  Dermot, you look 'ealthy now,
    Your does is neat an' clean,
  Hi never sees you drunk about,
    W'erehever 'ave you been?"


The stave chanted as an appetizer for the music-lover, she wiped the
baby's nose with her ostentatiously white apron, and protested it to
be the image of its father--blowed up in a Mind.

"You mean a mine, don't you?" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when the
widow once more burst into song.

  "Your wife and Fam'ly--Har they well?
    You once did use them strynge!
  Ho!  Har you kinder to them now?
    And wence this 'appy chynge?"


Reverting to prose, as P. C. Breagh lounged listlessly on, she
demanded why, if he wasn't going to buy, he had stopped and given a
respectable female Tongue.

"And not even fork out a copper, you blistered swindler!  You
blindin', blazin'----"

"Come now, Chanting Poll, what's all this here row about?"

The gruff, not unkindly voice of a policeman broke in upon the rusty
widow's eloquence.  P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse,
wheeled and swung back again.

"It's all right, constable, the lady was only having a bit of chaff
with me!"

"I know her!" said P. C. 999, C. Division, removing a heavy but not
brutal hand from the lady in question, "and the kind o' chaff she
slings.  Done Time for it, too, she 'as--before now!"

But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking with the
elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with iron toe-caps, and
iron-nailed soles at least two inches in thickness; and the dank
widow cocked a knowing eye at his retreating back, and the other at
her unexpected champion.

"Good for you, my dear!  Stand us a drain for luck, since you're so
civil!"

He returned:

"I would if I'd got the tin!  I believe I'm poorer than you are!"

"S'welp me bob! wot 'ave we 'ere?  A haristocrat in distress, har
yer?" she demanded.

"Not quite," he told her, as she turned the ponderous batteries of
her raillery upon him.  "I've seen an aristocrat in distress to-day,
and he was worse than me.  I'd not change!"

"Fer ten thousand jimmies hannual hincome, an' a 'ouse at Number One
'Yde Park Corner!" she jeered.  "'Ow did yer lose the
I'm-so-funny?--for if you 'aven't it now, you 'ave 'ad it, I'll tyke
me Davy!"

"It's--a long story!  Good-bye!"

He nodded and was moving on, when she shot out a gaunt hand and
clutched him by the sleeve, crying:

"'Old 'ard, Mister!  'Ang on till I give this 'ere squealer to its
mammy.  About due now, she ought to be!"

"Isn't it..."  His surprised look tickled the relict of the blown-up
husband into a chuckle.

"Mine?  Not by 'arf!  A tizzy per workin'-day is wot I pays for the
loan of 'er.  Nothin' like a babby--specially in narsty weather like
this 'ere--to touch the people's 'arts!  Lil's mine, though, ain't
you, deary?"

A preternaturally bright-eyed, white-faced, wizened little creature
peeped out from the shelter of the ostentatiously clean apron, making
a sound as of assent.

"Is she ill?" asked P. C. Breagh commiseratingly.

"Not 'er, that's her color!"

"Hungry, perhaps?" he asked.

"Why should she be? ... Wot did yer 'ave fer dinner, Lil?  Speak up
like a good gal an' tell the gen'lman!"

The small, grimy finger came out of the wide mouth.  She lisped
confidingly:

"Ay'po'rth o' gin 'ot, an' a stit o' totlit!"

"My God!" gasped P. C. Breagh in horror, "does that baby drink hot
gin?"

"When she can get it! an' so does Hi!" explained the lady of the
ballads, whom a short female in a plaid shawl and a battered brown
bonnet had now relieved of the baby.  She added hospitably: "Come an'
'ave two-pennorth o' comfort along o' me now!  It's meat and drink
both! as you'll find afore long!  I'll stand treat--no blarney!"

But he groaned and fled from the tragic pair, seeing the blazing eyes
of the drunkard, set in the small white childish face, staring at him
from the gas-lamps and the hoardings, from the paving-stones beneath
his hurrying feet, and from under the hats of passing strangers; and
peering between the slowly-moving shoals of sooty smoke and muddy
vapor, streaking the livid grayness overhead.




XIII

Pall Mall was some relief.  He looked for the Junior United Service
Club, and found it; for the Rag,--and for a time walked up and down
in the vicinity of both of these stately institutions, heartened by
the memory that his father had been a member of the former--listening
with eager ears to scraps of conversation between soldierly,
well-groomed, clear-voiced men in evening dress, lingering on the
wide doorsteps to finish some animated discussion, or waiting for
cabs and hansoms, the common hack, or the smart private vehicle, low
on the wheels at that date, and more heavily built than the later S.
and T.

Certain bald, mustached, and red-faced veterans, scrupulously attired
for the evening--delighted him extremely.

"By George, General!" he heard one of them say, as he went by, his
slouch forgotten, his shoulders squared, his head held up, "look at
that seedy-looking chap there!  Twelve to one in sixpences he's one
of the 'supererogatory useless infantrymen,' kicked out by Cardwell,
after twelve years' Service.  D'ye take the bet or no?"

The reference to the unpopular War Secretary under whose effacing
hand infantry regiments had not only lost their numbers, but in many
cases vanished from the rolls of the Army, swallowed up in the New
System of Amalgamation--had, as was intended, the effect of the red
rag on the bull.  The General bellowed:

"Confound me if I don't!  Pay the cabman, McIntosh, while I put the
fellow through his paces!  Hi!  Hi!  Come here, you, sir!"

Then, as P. C. Breagh, summoned by an imperious wave of the umbrella,
stepped out of the fogginess into the mellow circle of light
streaming through the glass doors of the brilliant vestibule:

"What's your regiment? ... Give me the old designation!  ... I know
nothing of new-fangled names; ... All my eye and Betty Martin! and I
don't care a dee who hears me say it! ... What is your rank, name and
battalion-number?  When were you discharged? ... Where's your
small-book and certificate? ... Got 'em about you?  ... Every soldier
has 'em about him!  And why don't you answer, dee you!--why don't you
answer, man?"

The volley of interrogations left no room for reply.  A second might
have followed had not the General's crony, in unconcealed ecstasies
at the sulky embarrassment of the victim and the determined attitude
of the inquisitor, intervened:

"Dashed sorry!  My mistake!  Believe you've landed a civilian, after
all, General!"

"Be dee'd! and so I have!" the General, after a raking stare,
admitted.  Then he took his crony's arm, they wheeled, and marched
into the Club together.  From whence issued, a moment later, a small
boy in buttons, who, after a look up and a look down the street,
pursued the retreating figure of the stalwart young man in the gray
felt wide-awake and shaggy greatcoat, and arrested it with the words:

"'Arf a jiff, my covey!" He added, as the retreating figure wheeled
and surveyed him in hard-eyed silence: "Wasn't it you what Old
Fireworks went for just now on the 'Rag and Famish' steps?"

"The General called to me--mistaking me for----"

"I know!"  The boy in buttons winked.  "He's always a-pitching into
somebody in mistake for somebody else!  Catch hold!  This is for you!"

This was a warm half-crown, thrust upon P. C. Breagh, without further
ceremony.  He flushed a murky, savage red, and shouted:

"What is this for? ... Who had the infernal insolence----"

He choked.  Buttons, plainly regarding the tramp who could be
insulted by half-a-crown as a new species, stared at him with
circular orbs of astonishment, retorting:

"What's it for?  How do I know, stoopid?  He told me to catch you and
give it you....  Cool that!  Well, blow me!..."

These expressions being evoked by the swift, supple movement of arm
and wrist that had sent the half-crown flying into the midst of the
Pall Mall traffic.  A sharp ring on the wood-pavement, a yell, and a
flourish of naked heels, and a street Arab had seized the treasure.
As the fog swallowed the wealthy imp, said Buttons icily:

"That's your game, is it?--pavin' Pall Mall with 'arf bulls for
gutter-pads to pick up.  Better ha' tipped it to me!--or sent it back
to Old Fireworks.  He ain't got too many of 'em.  Signs too many
toast-and-water tickets to be flush!"

Perhaps P. C. Breagh, scalding with wrath as he was, would have dived
in among the traffic to recover the coin had it been recoverable.
But the snows of yester-year were not more irretrievably gone.  He
realized it, hung his head and hunched his shoulders, and moved away
from the region of clubs, where officers of the twin Services talked
shop in sublime indifference to other subjects, as white-chokered
attendants supplied them with savory meats and cheering drinks.


Be sorry for the boy with the gaunt wolf Hunger at his heels, and the
black demon of Despair sitting on his shoulders.  That determination
of his to face what might come, and take his luck in a cheerful
spirit, was to be put to a yet fiercer test before the dawn of a new
day.

He was hungry and thirsty, and sorely tempted to break into his
solitary shilling.  But that silver barrier between himself and
pennilessness was not to be lightly changed.  He wondered, as he
recalled to mind the many occasions upon which he had wantonly
squandered and wasted money, whether an experience such as this,
previously undergone, would not have been a valuable lesson in thrift?

He presently came by a well-known theater.  It was too early for the
frequenters of the Stalls and Boxes and Grand Circle.  But playgoers
of the humbler kind were pouring in to fill the unnumbered seats in
the upper tiers, and a crowd composed of the usual elements had
gathered at the doors of the Pit and Gallery, and filled the narrow
side-alley in which these were situated, and overflowed into the
Strand.

Queues not being officially recognized and regulated, there was a
good deal of obstruction and pushing and persiflage.  Pausing a
moment under the gas-jet bordered, glazed shelter ornamenting the
box-office entrance, his unseasoned eyes winced as they took in a
sad, sad sight.

You saw her as a woman not past early middle-age, nobly proportioned,
and even in her dreadful degradation, imperially beautiful.  An old
velvet mantle covered her, from which the torn and moth-eaten
fur-trimming hung in draggled festoons.  A trained silk gown, stained
and torn and flounced with mud of many thicknesses, trailed upon the
slushy Strand pavement; a broken bonnet perched on a palpably false
and inconceivably dirty chignon, the false curls that cascaded from
beneath it, hid a workhouse-crop of rusty gray....  And she lifted
her skirts aside, disclosing muddy bare feet shod with a
trodden-down, elastic-sided boot and a ragged slipper; and stepped
across the threshold of the gilt and mirrored vestibule with a
graceful, royal air....

"Now then, missus!  Out of this, will you!"

A uniformed theater-attendant had advanced toward the intruder.  But
she did not retreat in terror at his truculence.  She drew herself
up, and folded her arms upon her bosom, and confronted the menial
with a haughty, quelling stare.

"Man! who are you to drive me from this threshold?  Out of the way!
Clear!--and let me look at her.  Do you ask whom?  She! that woman
who stands behind you smiling, with the white dove perched upon her
whiter hand.  Times have changed, my girl, since you and I last saw
each other!  Well, well!  You are the same, whatever I may be!"

She laughed, a deep, melodious ha, ha, ha! not at all like the
laughter of everyday people.  Even P. C. Breagh, inexperienced as he
was in such matters, recognized it as the artificial laughter of the
stage.  And, profiting by the momentary confusion of the functionary,
she swept in her silken rags toward the person indicated; who looked
back at her with beautiful stagey eyes from a life-sized canvas,
wearing a stage costume; standing in a pose of the theater; fondling
the bird that was palpably a property of the scene.

A long gilt-framed mirror hung beside the portrait, and to this she
pointed with the tattered remnants of her theatrical manner,
exclaiming with another of the stage laughs:

"Look upon this picture and on that!  Ye gods!..."  Adding, as the
guardian of the vestibule, now wroth, advanced upon her: "No!  Don't
you hustle me.  I'm off, governor!  Farewell.  Ta-ta!--until we meet
again!"

She was gone, but she must have noted the boy who stared, fascinated
by her haggard beauty and her dreadful misery.  In fact, P. C.
Breagh, passing on, had barely traversed a dozen yards of slushy
pavement, before, with a bound and rush, a supple movement, predatory
and feline, the woman emerged from an alley, and was by his side.

"Who are you?  A waif, like me?  Where do you come from?  I saw you
looking at me with all your eyes and your heart in them!--I played
that scene with the picture and the mirror for you!  You know----"
She took P. C. Breagh's reluctant arm and leaned to his ear, being
taller than he was, "There's always one person in the house you play
to--and when that person's not there--the inspiration doesn't come.
When it won't, you--shall I tell you what you do if God hasn't made
you able to say 'No' to them?--you send out the devils to fetch you
brandy and champagne!"

She laughed wildly and looked round suspiciously.

"Walk fast!  A policeman's behind us, shadowing us.  I'll tell you my
story as we go.  Did you ever hear of Anabel Foltringham?  You must
have!  Everybody has!  I drew crowds to that theater you've seen me
kicked out of!--I was beautiful--great--famous!  Men gloated over my
beauty--they hung upon my every word.  That made the devils
jealous--the smooth, servile, obsequious devils in white aprons, that
you find behind the scenes at every theater.  They call them
dressers, but I know better, you can't deceive me!  You boy, I like
your face!  You look at me as if I were a Christian, and a man I knew
had eyes like yours! ... Don't leave me!  I'll make it worth your
while to stay, only listen! ... I'll teach you all I know, make you a
greater artist than any of them.  For the things that you shall learn
from me--I learned myself--in Hell!"

She hung upon the boy's wincing arm, her terrible breath scorched
him, her burned-out eyes appalled--her greedy, long-nailed clutch
found his flesh through his sleeve like the talons of a beast of
prey.  And he wrenched himself free, and fled, sick at heart;
fancying that the old boot and shoe were running after him, and that
the mud-trimmed silk gown flapped at his hurrying heels like leathery
wings.

He broke into his shilling to pass the turnstile of Waterloo Bridge,
stowed himself in a corner of one of the seated niches, and found
relief in the presence of a stray kitten, sore-footed, hungry-eyed,
ginger-haired, that rubbed against his legs and responded with
appreciative purrs to his tentative back-strokings and ear-rubbings,
administered half-unconsciously, as he wondered why human
beings--under certain given circumstances, should be so much more
beastly than the brutes?

The kitten jumped on his knee.  He saw that its fur had been
torn--probably by a dog--and shuddered at the remembrance of having
more than once set a rough-haired terrier--a companion of his early
boyhood--to worry stray cats--and enjoyed the carnage resulting.  Why
did he shudder now?  Because by a feat of imagination only possible
to one who was beginning to learn what it is to be homeless and
hunted and desperate, he had got inside the ginger kitten's ragged
skin, and established between himself and what we are content to call
inferior creatures a bond of brotherhood.

"Don't you go, Kitty! though I can't make it much worth your while to
stop," he muttered.  "If I'd got the things--a scrap of lint and a
saucer of clean water, a needleful of silk and a dab of carbolic
ointment--I could patch up that tear--you'd be as good as new inside
of a week."

He yawned, and the tramp of booted feet and the shuffle of naked ones
grew faint in his ears; and presently the rush and roar of the Bridge
roadway-traffic dulled to a hum--and he was deadly sleepy.  With
blundering fingers he undid two buttons of the frieze greatcoat and
tucked the kitten inside--and after turning round three times, and
making a great parade of clawing the surface soft enough for comfort,
it curled up and fell asleep, and its host not only slept, but snored.

Even in sleep he was dogged and haunted by those three tragic
figures;--the broken-down _viveur_, the child dying on gin, the lost
creature who had once been Anabel Foltringham--they cropped up in his
troubled dreams, over and over again.  And he woke up, and it was
dark, and a sleety rain was stinging him, and even the kitten in his
breast was cold and cried.

He got up, aching and stiff, hungry and thirsty, realizing that he
must have slept for hours.  Big Ben boomed twelve.  A midnight
express from Charing Cross dragged its chain of yellow lights across
the railway bridge with a hollow roar and rattle.  One or two shapes
passed, vaguely human in the wintry darkness; a Post Office van or
so, with an official inside sorting bags by the light of a swinging
lantern, three or four crawling cabs, a trolley with a formless mass
upon it, pushed by two indistinct, slow-moving figures, coming from
the Surrey side.

Toward the Strandward end of the Bridge there was a light, with murky
figures moving about it.  Revealed by its two flaring naphtha-lamps,
the characteristic hostelry of the London gutters, with its gaudy
paint and patriotic decorations, its clean shelves piled up with
homely food, and hung with common crockery, its steaming urns of hot
and comforting drink,--proved a Godsend to one more hungry and
homeless vagrant.

The shipwrecked mariner of his analogy might have known the same
sense of relief, seeing his signal answered and some stout vessel,
flying the red ensign of the British Mercantile Marine, bearing down
upon his tiny, wave-washed raft....  P. C. Breagh was guilty of
prodigality at that coffee-stall.  A penny cup of coffee, weak, but
hot, and a twopenny sandwich, consisting of two slices of bread
smeared with mustard and inclosing something by courtesy called ham,
but really pertaining to that less stylish part of the pig known as
"gammon," took the edge off his savage appetite.  A ha'porth of milk
for the kitten, and another ha'porth of ham-trimmings, left him lord
of seven-pence halfpenny cash.

Thus, warmed and cheered, he went back to his seat in the niche
again, noting that every stone bench he passed had now its seated
group, or prone extended figures.  His recently vacated place had its
occupant, a thin, barefooted young man, indescribably ragged; who
slept with his famished face--sharp and yellow as a wedge of
cheese--turned to the sky, and the Adam's apple of his lean throat
jerking, as though something alive, swallowed inadvertently, was
madly struggling to get out.

And as he leaned upon the eastward parapet of the Bridge with the
ginger kitten, now replete and happy, purring on his shoulder, and
watched the wild welter of black water, pale-patched with foam and
spume, rushing away beneath him, to plunge growling through the
arches of Blackfriars Bridge, and speed away under Southwark and
London Bridges, past the Custom House, Traitor's Gate and the Docks,
between Wapping and Rotherhithe on its way to Greenwich and Poplar
and Blackwell; and thence, by the verdant heights of Charlton to
Woolwich, widening to a mile here; and so on past Gravesend and the
Nore Light to where it flows between Whitstable and Foulness
Point--eighteen miles broad; a kingly river, carrying on its back the
commerce of the world.

The wind blew bitter cold from the heights of Hampstead.  A livid
moon blinked through rifts in ink-black cloud-wrack above the Shot
Towers and a huge mass of brewery-buildings on the right.  On the
left, revealed in glimpses and suggestions by stray moonbeams and
wind-blown lamp-flares, was a great confusion of trucks and trolleys;
huge cranes rearing skeleton arms aloft, colossal cauldrons, heaps of
clay beside yawning trenches, winking red eyes of warning for belated
wanderers.  All this beyond a banking-face of stone masonry with
completed piers, showed where the Victoria Embankment would be
by-and-by.  Meanwhile chaos reigned; the area would have been an
appropriate playground for the inhabitants of Bethlem Hospital, in
hours of relaxation, or on national holidays.

P. C. Breagh laughed gallantly at his own conceit, and his chapped
lips cracked and hurt him.  He staunched the bleeding with his
handkerchief, conscious that a day might come when he should cease to
have any use for such an article.  Habits die hard with us, but the
cleanly ones go first, being acquired.  We continue to desire food
and drink long after we have left off caring about the color of our
linen--nay! long after we have become indifferent to the fact that we
wear no linen at all.

He was bone-weary; his thigh-bones seemed wearing through their
sockets.  His knees ached, his feet were heavy as solid lumps of
lead.  It occurred to him that the two things most desirable on earth
were an arm-chair and a roasting fire to toast before.  Failing that,
a seat on a stone bench, with a north wind gnawing you was better
than nothing....  He thought that by now one of the sleepers in the
niches would have wakened up and moved on.

Vain hope.  Where one had withdrawn, his place had been filled by
three newcomers.  Misery, Dirt, Drunkenness, Disease, and
Wretchedness herded in those stony refuges, mercifully winked at by
the patroling policeman with the unsavory-smelling bull's-eye.  And
strange beings perambulated or crept the pavement; 2 a.m. is the time
when you may see them!--emerging from the foul hiding-places where
they pass the daylight hours, to wander forth unseen....

Such goblin forms, such Gorgon faces, revealed by some fitful ray of
watery moonlight, or the lamp of a languid, belated cab....  It was a
waking nightmare, a Dantesque vision realized, inconceivably hideous
to nerves already weakening.  The Celtic strain derived from his
father, in conjunction with the sensitive romantic nature bequeathed
by Milly Fermeroy, might have urged their son to end things that
bleak January night, with a leap from the parapet and a plunge into
the wild black welter tumbling under the Bridge arches.  But P. C.
Breagh was not fated to join the procession of grim, unconscious
voyagers, that wallow in the tides and circle in the eddies, flounder
under the sides of barges, beat upon the piles and bridge-piers, and
sink to slumber in the river-sludge a while, before they rise, more
dreadful than before, to journey on again....

His mother's faith plucked him as before, from the desperate brink of
the temptation; and--he had worked in the dissecting-rooms and walked
the hospitals, toward that end of failure previously recorded,--and
the hardening did yeoman's service now.  But it went badly with
him--at one period of that week-long night particularly....  He never
liked to speak of that experience....  But long, long afterward he
said to one who loved him:

"I held on to my reason, and prayed Our Lord for daylight.  And--I
don't know how I managed--but somehow, I got through!"

He found a seat at length, not knowing by whom or how it had been
vacated, and dropped into it and slept like the dead.  And he awoke
in a windless lull,--to a strange bluish-yellow radiance in the sky
beyond the great squat dome of St. Paul's and the crowding chimneys
of the City: and felt the stir and thrill and quiver that is the sign
of this sad world's waking to yet another day.

Three homeless women shared the seat with him.  Two were awake,
watching him not unkindly.  A third slept, leaning forward in a
huddled attitude, propped by the handle of a basket she held upon her
knees.  She breathed in whistling squeals,--a night on Waterloo
Bridge in January encourages bronchitis....  He listened for a
moment, then with a prodigal impulse, dropped twopence of his
eightpence into the basket on her lap.  And she woke, and said with
an Irish accent:

"May the heavens be yer bed!" and slept again, heavily.

The second woman snuffled out in the accents of the East End:

"Gawd bless you, good gen'leman!"

The third lifted a tattered scarlet head-shawl, and flashed a pair of
jet-black Oriental eyes upon him:

"Fortune and Life!"

To her he said, with a creditable effort at cheeriness:

"I've lost the fortune, mother! the life's about all I've got that's
left to me!"

"And a good thing too, my gorgious!  Don't yer complain of it!  Come,
tip us yer vast!"  She added, as he stared uncomprehending--"Eight or
left-hand dook--whichever the Line's brightest in.  Have yer a--No!
I'll give yer of my jinnepen for naught!"

He held out the broad, strong palm, grimy enough by dawn-light.  She
peered, spat on the chilly gray pavement and said:

"You keep up heart--there's a change a-coming soon!"

"Can't come too soon for me!"  His smile was rueful.

"Keep up heart, I tell yer!" she bade him.  "Yer'll travel a long
road and a bloody road, and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love,
and never know it.  Until the end, that is, when tute is jasing.  And
there's a finer fortune than I meant yer to get o' me!  Shake her up,
Bet!"  She explained, as the other woman turned to rouse the sleeper,
"Taken a great cold, she has!  We're fetching her to the Hospital.
'Tholomewses in Smithell, for the gorgio doctors to make her well.
Though that's not where I would lie, my rye, and my pipes playing the
death-tune.  Shoon tu, dilya!  Better shake her again!"

"Wake up, deer!  There's a good soul!"

They stood up, supporting the bronchial Irishwoman between them,
shaking and straightening their frowsy garments--tidying themselves
as the poorest women will.  Then with, a farewell word they moved on,
northward.  And P. C. Breagh, following them with reddened,
night-weary eyes, saw his Fate coming, though he did not know it, in
the person of a small and shabbily-attired elderly man.




XIV

He came striding from the Strand side, in a red-hot hurry, making as
much noise with his boots as three ordinary pedestrians.  He wore no
overcoat, but was buttoned up in a decent black serge frock, having
his throat protected by a large white cashmere wrapper.  Also he wore
gray mixture trousers, rather baggy at the knees, and shiny, and was
crowned with a well-worn silk top-hat.

He walked at a great pace, swinging his arms, which were inordinately
lengthy, and finished with hands of extra size, encased in white
knitted woolen bags not distantly resembling boxing-gloves.  When he
reached the middle of the Bridge, he stopped and backed against the
west parapet, folded his arms, and,--or so it seemed to P. C. Breagh,
who was watching him for the sole reason that he happened to be the
only cheerful-looking, decently-clad human being within his range of
vision--snuffed the breeze, and considered the prospect with a
consciously-possessive air.  In moving his head sideways, so as to
extend his view, his sharp black glance encountered that of his
neighbor, and he nodded, and thus their acquaintance began.

"I'm glad to see, young gentleman," said the little man--and "_My
eye!  Do I still look like anything of that sort?_" was the young
gentleman's unvoiced aside: "I'm glad to see that you don't number
one among the many thousands--if I was to say Millions I shouldn't be
guilty of exaggeration--who under-estimate the value of fresh morning
air.  For my part, without boasting, I may call myself a walking
Monument to its healthiness, or as you can't put up a monument to a
live man--I'll say, a Living Testimonial."

He had a yellow, tight-drawn, wearied skin, with a patch of rather
hectic red on either cheekbone, and his bright black eyes twinkled at
the bottom of hollow orbits, overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows of the
deepest black.  When he took off his hat to cool his head, from which
quite a cloud of steam arose, you could perceive that he was baldish,
and that his bristly hair and large mutton-chop side-whiskers owed,
like his shaggy eyebrows, their intense and aggressive blackness to a
conscientious but unskillful dyer, for by the cold and searching
light of morning, delicate nuances of green and purple were seen to
mingle with their youthful sable, and here and there the roots showed
grayish-white.

"I was given up by the Doctors at the age of twenty," said the little
man, "as I had been previously give up by 'em at eleven and fifteen.
'The boy's in Rapid Decline,' says one, 'keep him out o' drafts and
give him boiled snails and asses' milk.'  My poor mother did her
best, stopping up window-cracks with paste and paper, and stuffing
chimneys with old carpets.  And living as we was at Hampstead
Village, and the Heath being productive in snails and donkeys, the
rest o' the prescription was easy to carry out.  Still I got lankier
and went on coughing o' nights.  Says Doctor Number Two, 'It's a case
of Galloping Consumption.  Feed him up, clothe him warmly, encourage
him to take gentle exercise, and avoid chills whatever you do!'  So
my mother swadged me up in flannel, made me eat a mutton chop every
two hours, and trot up and down the front-garden for exercise between
chops; and she'd pour half-a-pint o' porter down me whenever I stood
still.  And in spite of all her affectionate solicitude," said the
little man with a twinkle, "I kep' on wasting, and coughing and
spitting, and doing everything that a young fellow in a galloping
consumption could do, short of galloping out o' this world into
another.  And Doctor Number Three says,--being called in when I was
twenty: 'It's _phthisis pulmonalis_ in the advanced and incurable
stage.  You can do nothing at all for this young man but get him into
an Institute for Incurables.  Codliver Oil, Care, and Kindness,' so
says he, 'may prolong his miserable existence a month or two.  For
the rest, there's nothing to be done!'  If you'll believe me, that
news was the death of my poor mother.  She'd expected nothing else
for years--and yet it killed her at the end!  And I acted as Chief
Mourner at her funeral," ended the little man with a queer twist of
his lean, sharp jaws and a momentary dimming of his keen black eyes,
"in the pouring rain, and walked home without an overcoat--and got
wet to the skin, and stripped, and rubbed myself dry, and made a
rough supper of scalding oatmeal porridge, and went to bed and slep'
with the windows open top and bottom.  And that was over thirty years
ago, and I've never missed my morning sponge-over with cold water
since; nor never shut a window night or day, nor never run up a
doctor's bill, and don't mean to!  I left off coddling--once the
blessed old soul was gone!  Got better--better still--always expected
to die by those who'd knowed mother.  I traveled and saw Foreign
Parts,--not specially going about to pick the 'ealthiest climates,
knocked about abroad--came home and took to Business, and have taken
to it ever since, as you may see.  My health is robust," he made a
show of hitting his chest again, but thought better of it.  "I live
plain, and make a point of getting Fresh Air into my system whenever
possible.--This is the place I come to, as a rule, for the morning's
supply.  I take it on Blackfriars Bridge after the dinner-hour, the
eating-house I patronize being on Ludgate Hill," he added.  "And--I
don't know whether you happen to be a student of old Bill
Shakespeare, but there are some lines of his which might be twisted
into applying to me."  He drew a deep breath and delivered himself as
follows:

"Some are born Tough, some achieve Toughness--others have Toughness
thrust upon them."

He smote his chest hard with a muffled hand, and coughed in that
rather hollow fashion, adding: "Without vanity, I may consider myself
as belonging to the latter class!  Eh?"

P. C. Breagh agreed that the speaker might be considered as belonging
to the latter class.

"For at this moment I am as fresh as paint," said the little man
proudly, "and as lively as a kitten, yet I have been up and about and
on my legs all night!  I left our place of business at 3.20 a.m.,
reached Charing Cross by 3.30, was on the platform when the Dover
Boat Train steamed in--bringing mails and passengers that have
crossed in the Night Boat from Cally--took over a shorthand report
from a Special Correspondent--who has been to Paris to gather details
of a political murder," he tapped the breast of his black frock-coat,
which showed the bulging outline of a thick notebook.  "And in the
absence of our News Editor--who's been sent to Brummagem to report
Mr. Bright's speech on Popular Education, Irish Amelioration, and
Free Trade,--Parliamentary affairs being at a standstill this holiday
season,--I shall hand 'em to the Senior Sub., who'll distribute the
stuff and have it set up by the time the Chief drops in from Putney
at eleven.  It's for to-morrow's issue, following the ten-line
telegram we publish this morning.  A column-and-a-half of Latest
Intelligence!" the little man screwed up his eyes and licked his lips
as though reveling in the flavor of some rare gastronomic delicacy.
"And if I had the say as to the setting of it--which I haven't!--and
was free to indulge my predilection for showy printing--which I never
shall be!--it should be headed with caps an inch high--and spaced and
leaded all the way down."

His black eyes snapped: his hectic cheeks grew fiery.

"Headed with inch-high caps, ah! and spaced and leaded from the top
to the bottom.  Fancy how it 'ud lay siege to the Public Eye, and
draw the Public's coppers!  When I shut my eyes I can fair see the
editions running out."

He recited, marking out the lines and spaces with a finger encased in
white woolen:

  A PRINCE MURDERS
  ONE MAN AND
  FIRES AT ANOTHER
  IN HIS OWN
  GILDED DRAWING-ROOM.
  PARIS SENSATION.
  COUSIN OF
  THE FRENCH EMPEROR KILLS
  A JOURNALIST
  ON THE VERY DAY WHEN
  THE FRENCH LEGISLATIVE
  BODY
  MEET TO INAUGURATE THE NEW ERA
  OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT
  UNDER NAPOLEON III.


His eyes snapped, his hectic cheeks flamed, he was evidently launched
on a subject that was near the heart beating beneath the bulgy
pocket-book.  He talked fast; and as he talked he waved his arms, and
gesticulated with the large hands encased in the woolly boxing-gloves.

"I cherish ambitions, perhaps you'll say, above my calling, which I
don't mind owning is that of Newspaper Publishers' Warehouseman.
Perhaps I do--perhaps I don't!  My own opinion is I'm before my time,
a kind of Anachronism the wrong way round," said the little man
rather ruefully, "and rightly belong to--say forty years hence.  As
the poet Shakespeare says, and if it wasn't him it ought to have
been!  'Sweet are the uses of Advertisement.'  I'm a believer in
Advertisement, always have been and always shall be!"

His garrulity was an individual and not unpleasant trait, implying
confidence in others' sympathy.  He went on:

"Being Nobody in particular, my views have never been took up and
acted on.  Though I enjoy a good deal of confidence and am--I hope I
am!--respected in my place.  For as Solomon said, somewhere in
Proverbs--'Designs are strengthened by counsels,' and our Chief
himself hasn't been too proud to say, on occasion: 'Knewbit, what
would you do in this or that case?'  Such as you see me, I am often
at the 'Ouse of Commons, when sittings are late and speeches have to
be jotted down in mouthfuls and carried away and set up in snacks....
For my constitution is of that degree of toughness--sleep or no sleep
matters little to me, and that I am as fresh at this moment as you
are," he bit off the end of a yawn, "I wouldn't mind betting a
sixpence now!"

Said P. C. Breagh, at last getting in a word edgeways:

"If you lost--and you would lose!--and paid--and I expect you'd
pay!--my capital would be doubled.  I'm not a young swell who has got
up early to look at London.  I'm a vagrant on the streets--and it
strikes me I must look like it.  To-day I've got to find work of some
kind.  Can you give me a job in your warehouse?  I'm strong and
willing and honest--up to now!  But by G--! if stealing a bunch of
turnips off a costermonger's barrow will get me a full belly and a
clean bed in prison, I expect I shall have to do it before long, if I
can't find work anywhere!"

"Bless my soul!" said the garrulous little man excitedly.  "And I
thought you were a Medical Student or an artist (some of 'em aren't
over-given to clothes-brushes and soap-and-water), and here I stood
a-jawing and you starving all the time! ... Work--of course you shall
have work, though I can't promise it'll be the kind o' work that's
fit for an educated young gentleman----"

"Any work is fit for a gentleman," snarled P. C. Breagh, "that a
decent man can do!  What I want is----"

"What you want is--Breakfast and a wash and brush-up!" cried the
little man excitedly.  "And that you must go to Miss Ling and get.
Say Mr. Knewbit sent you--I'm Knewbit,--Christian name Solomon.  It's
No. 288 Great Coram Street--second turn to your right above Russell
Square.  Cross the Strand and go up Wellington Street and Bow Street,
cross Long Acre and ... but you're too dead-beat to walk it.  Take a
growler--it'll be eighteenpence from here unless the cabby's lost to
every sense of decency.  Borrow the money from me--here it is!  I
give you my word you shall be able to pay me back to-morrow.  Here is
a cab!  Hi!  Phew'w!"  Mr. Knewbit whistled scientifically, and the
preternaturally red-nosed driver of an old and jingling four-wheeler
pulled up beside the curb as P. C. Breagh stammered out:

"I--I can't thank! ... You're too confoundedly kind! ... and I'd
begun to think that all men were thieves or scoundrels--except a
poor, sick beggar of a swell I met yesterday, whose wife and children
shun him and whose valet bullies him!  I can't refuse, you know! ...
Things are too..."

"The fare will be two shillings if you talk one minute longer!"
warned Mr. Knewbit, opening the door of the straw-carpeted,
moldy-smelling vehicle.  "I can see extortion in that man's eye.  I'm
a judge of character, that's what I am.  Bless my soul!  Is that
kitten yours?"

For the ginger Tom, with arched back and erect tail, was walking
round P. C. Breagh's legs, purring insinuatingly, and his companion
of the night's vigil said hesitatingly, looking at the meager,
homeless mite:

"He seems to think so!  And--he helped me through last night.  Would
you mind if I took him?  I'll pay for his keep as soon as ever I----"

Mr. Knewbit shouted in a violent hurry:

"In with you!  Cat and all!  Don't apologize!  Miss Ling adores 'em!
Three in the house already--waste bits left on the dustbin for needy
strangers.  Don't forget!  288 Great Coram Street, Russell Square.
Drive on, cabby!"

He added, dancing up and down excitedly on the pavement, as the
jingling four-wheeler rolled on, with the pair of castaways:

"Lord!  if I only had the setting up of that young fellow's story,
how I would give it 'em in leaded capitals!"


He closed his eyes in ecstasy and saw, in large black letters
standing out across the clear horizon of the new day to which London
was waking:

  LONDON DRAMA.
  BEGGARED HEIR TO WEALTH
  ROBBED.
  CAST ON THE STREETS!
  SOLE COMPANION A KITTEN!
  PATHETIC STORY.


"Not that I know he is the heir to wealth, but it looks well,
uncommon!  Uncommon well, it looks!" said Mr. Knewbit.




XV

When the Editorial Staff of the _Early Wire_ had gone home, or to the
Club, by cab or private brougham or on foot, in the blackest hours of
the night or the smallest hours of the morning; when the Printing
Staff had filed out, pale and respectably attired, or thundered down
the iron-shod staircases in grimy, inky, oily _déshabillé_, then the
Publishing Staff trooped in and took possession.  And, as the lines
of carts backed up to the curb, and were filled by brawny
shirt-sleeved men, who tossed the huge bales of newspapers from hand
to hand with the nonchalant skill of jugglers doing tricks with
willow-pattern plates and oranges, the Business Department began to
empty so much that you could see the eyebrows of clerks behind the
iron-nailed unplaned deal counters; and Mr. Knewbit, slackening in
his terrific energy, would cease keeping count, and tallying, and
writing cabalistic signs on huge packages with the stump of blue
pencil that never was used up.  And he would mop his face and say--in
the same invariable formula:

"Well! we've broke the back of the day's work, and lucky if no one
can say no worse of us!"

Later on, when the last newspaper-cart had been gorged and rattled
away, and the last newspaper-boy had darted out with his armful, and
his mouth open for the yell that would issue from it the moment his
bare feet hit the pavement of Fleet Street, and the office of the
_Early Wire_ and all the other offices that had got off the Morning
Issue had an air of dozing with blinking eyes and mouths half
open--when the Evening Papers were at the height of strenuous
effort,--Mr. Knewbit would arrange the limited supply of hair
remaining on his cranium with a pocket-comb, titivate his whiskers by
the aid of a tiny scrap of looking-glass nailed inside his desk-lid,
dust the blacks off his collar, straighten his cravat--which boasted
a breastpin that was an oval plaque of china, painted with a
miniature of a young lady with flowing ringlets, rosy cheeks, white
arms and shoulders, pink legs and a diaphanous tutu, dancing, crowned
with roses in front of a sylvan waterfall,--and betake himself out to
dine.

Sometimes he would patronize the "Old Cheshire Cheese" chop-house,
where they gave you beefsteak puddings on Saturdays.  Or "The Cock"
would have his custom, or he would drop in at an eating-house in St.
Paul's Churchyard, where Irish stew, boiled beef with dumplings and
carrots, or tripe and onions were the staple dishes in winter months.
In summer you got roast mutton and green peas and gooseberry tart
with custard; but whatever the season or the dish, it was always
washed down with whisky-and-water, or gin-and-lemonade, or the
strongest of strong beer.

For this particular tavern was patronized by the penny-a-liners of
Paternoster Row and the vicinity; out-at-elbows, and generally
seedy-looking literary free-lances, who picked up a living by
inditing touching tracts and poignant pamphlets for religious
Societies bearing arresting titles, such as:

"STOP!  YOU ARE OUT AT THE GATHERS!  Or, The Tale of a Skirt," and
"DEAD LOCKS FOR LIVE HEADS!  By A Converted Hairdresser."  Or
biographical accounts of the brief lives and protracted deaths of
Little E----, aged seven, or Miss Madeline P---- of X----.

Bearded men these, with bulbous noses, studded with ruby pimples;
full of strange oaths, reveling in profane jest and scurrilous talk.
Lanky youths with hollow eyes, uncut hair and crimson neckties, who
boasted of having cast off all shackles, bonds and fetters, civil,
social, moral and religious, and dreamed in their wilder moments of
the inauguration of a second British Commonwealth, and the reign of a
New Era of Socialism, and the planting of the Tree of Liberty in
Buckingham Palace Courtyard....

And over their strong meats, and the stronger liquors with which they
moistened them, these would discuss the plots of tracts, and so
forth, seasoning their discourse with highly-spiced pleasantries and
salacious witticisms, jesting in ribald sort at all things upon earth
and elsewhere; until--as Mr. Knewbit frequently said--you expected
the ceiling to come down and strike 'em speechless, and fancied you
saw wicked little hellish flames playing about the cutlery.

"Not that I ever read any of their stuff, you know!" he explained to
P. C. Breagh, "though I am a man that, to a certain extent, might be
considered a reader.  You've seen my library on the shelf by my
bed-head, and though three books might be held--in the opinion of
some people--to constitute rather a limited library, they're the
three best books that ever were written or ever will be.  Bar none!"

He was a Christian believer himself; of the easy-going,
undenominational, non-Church-going kind.  And when Sunday came round,
Miss Ling, after seeing the beef and potatoes and Yorkshire-pudding
safely into the oven, would charge him to watch over the same and
guard them from burning; and put on her best bonnet and pop over to
the Christian Mission Army Hall that used to be in Judd Street, W.C.,
for a supply of red-hot doctrine sufficient to stand her in a week of
working-days, while Mr. Knewbit smoked, kept an eye on the cooking,
and occasionally dipped into his library.

A popular edition of the Plays and Poems by one William Shakespeare,
together with a stout and bulky volume, "Gallowglass's Encyclopaedia
of Literary and Typographical Anecdote," and a worm-eaten,
black-leather-bound copy of the Bible--as translated from the Latin
Vulgate and published by the English College at Douay A.D. 1609,
formed Mr. Knewbit's library.  In the pages of these, their owner
frequently stated it as his opinion, might be found the finest
literature in the world.  He always ended:

"And I bought Gallowglass for half-a-crown off a barrow in
Camberwell, and Shakespeare was give me by a young fellow who found
him dullish reading--and the Book that beats 'em both I picked up in
the fourpenny box at a second-hand bookseller's in Clement's Inn!"

King Solomon and the son of Sirach of Jerusalem, with the Prophets
Isaiah and Hosea, were Mr. Knewbit's favorite Old Testament authors.
Of the Books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus he never wearied.  One
wonders how much he understood, but he quarried diligently in their
pages, and sometimes emerged into the light figuratively laden with
jewels.  Marvelous passages would drive home to the brain of the man
in blinding flashes of illumination, and he would lose the place in
his excitement,--being an unmethodical if omnivorous reader,--and
never be able to find them again....  So he quoted his Prophets from
memory and generally inaccurately, yet seldom without point or
inappropriately.  At other times, wearied with their glorious
obscurity, he reverted to the plainest and simplest of all the
stories ever written, and the sweetest and the saddest too....

He spoke of the Saviour as though he had known Him....

"I never could forgive them fellers"--I conceive he meant the
Disciples--"for cutting off and leaving Him to be pinched by that
gang in the Garden.  It was mean, that's what I call it.  Mean!  But
I will say they owned up their shabbiness in their writings
afterward.  Though you notice they hurry over that part.  And I'm not
surprised!  That young feller downstairs yet, Maria?"


This was at eight o 'clock on the Sunday morning following Mr.
Knewbit's meeting with Carolan on Waterloo Bridge.  Miss Ling,
stepping nimbly about the big front kitchen in the basement, busy
with her task of getting breakfast, returned that "Mr. Breagh had got
up and gone out at half-past six."

"For a shave?"

Mr. Knewbit rubbed his own bristly chin rather dubiously as he asked
the question.  Miss Ling, impaling a round of stale loaf upon a tin
toasting-fork, shook her neat head and answered in the negative.  Mr.
Breagh had mentioned that he was going to church.

"To church....  We'll hope he has gone," said Mr. Knewbit still more
dubiously, "though between me and you and the toasting-fork it sounds
too good to be true....  And 'The Brunswick Arms' is handy round the
corner.  If the young man don't rattle at the area-gate by the time
you've finished your toasting, I shall made bold to go and look for
him at the Bar.  Hulloa!  Here he is!  Now, that's what you might
call a pleasant disappointment!"

For he had glanced up at the strip of area-railings commanded by the
upper panes of the kitchen window, and seen the legs of P. C. Breagh
stride by at a great rate, stop, turn back, and descend the
area-steps.

You are to see Miss Ling receiving his morning greeting with the wide
smile that revealed an unbroken row of sound white teeth ("every one
her own," as Mr. Knewbit would say) and made her thin, triangular
face so pleasant.  She was a staid spinster, owning to forty-nine,
who would have died rather than confess to being fifty.  Her
magnificent hair, genuinely black and shining like ebony, was coiled
upon the top of her head too tightly for beauty.  Her well-marked
eyebrows and candid brown eyes slanted a little upward at the
temples, and her skin was rather yellowish than olive.  She was of a
flat and bony figure, active and sound and tough, and, in a plain
way, a first-rate cook and caterer.

"Though when I left her Ladyship the Countess of Crowmarsh," said
Miss Ling, "after fourteen years spent in the Castle nurseries,
gradually rising from nursery-maid to under-nurse, and then becoming
what his Lordship was pleased to call Head of the Bottle
Department--a very humorous nobleman his Lordship was at times!--I
had forgotten all I ever knew of my dear mother's
kitchen-teaching--she was a cook, Mr. Breagh, who had lived with the
first in the land! and when--being pensioned by the family--I decided
to risk the step of taking this house, and letting it out to lodgers,
preferring single gentlemen--I was forced to engage a widowed person
to prepare their meals at first."

"I remember her," said Mr. Knewbit, with his mouth full of poached
eggs and bacon.  "She could under-boil a pertater and calcine a chop
with any elderly female I ever yet come across.  Here, pussy! if you
ain't too proud for rasher-rinds?  And not you!" He leaned to the
hearth--he was sitting with his back to the glowing range, and
dropped his offering under the nose of the ginger kitten, which,
having already disposed of a saucer of bread-and-milk, instantly
grabbed.

"To-morrow," said P. C. Breagh, looking up from his rapidly-emptying
plate with the smile which Miss Ling had already decided was
pleasant, "I hope to prove to you that, like the kitten, I am not too
proud for anything that comes in my way."

"Presently, presently!" said Mr. Knewbit sharply.  "Everything in
good time! ... I don't like to be hurried.  And--what did you say was
the property you'd left with the--the Greedy Guts who runs that
Euston Road hotel?"

"There were three boxes of books--chiefly works on medicine and
surgery."  Carolan reflected a moment, stirring his coffee with one
of Miss Ling's Britannia-metal spoons.  "And two trunks, with clothes
and all that.  Things I valued.  My student's cap and _schläger_, and
the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and--a
Crucifix that was my mother's."  The speaker blinked and spoke a
little huskily: "Used to hang over my bed when I was a little chap in
frocks."

"Don't be cast down.  Some wave o' luck may wash your property ashore
at your feet one of these days.  What I will say is--I wish I had the
setting-up of that story for the paper!" said Mr. Knewbit, handing in
his plate for fried bread.  "Supposing you,"--he jerked his eyes at
Carolan--"had any talent in the literary line, it 'ud be worth your
while to throw off a quarter-col. of descriptive stuff."

"Relating to my experiences in that fellow's bug-ridden
lodging-house?  Why, I don't doubt I could--after a fashion," said P.
C. Breagh.

"After a fashion won't do.  Write it the best you know!  Sit down at
the kitchen-table here, when Maria's gone to her prayer-meeting and
I've got my pipe and Solomon to keep me quiet,--and blacken half a
quire o' paper--there's plenty in the drawer there!--with the
story--told short, crisp and plain, and with a dash o' humor, and
within four hundred words.  It would space out lovely!" said Mr.
Knewbit, arranging imaginary head-lines on the clean coarse
tablecloth.

  LONDON SHARK
  VICTIMIZES STUDENT!
  HE GRABS HIS GOODS
  AND LETS HIM GO!

"Ah, dear me!  If I had had your education.  But it's too late to
alter that.  What were you saying, Maria?"

Miss Ling was hoping that Mr. Breagh had passed a comfortable night?

"First rate, ma'am, many thanks to you!" returned the object of her
solicitude.

"For," said Miss Ling, with a homely kind of dignity, "if anything
was wanting, Mr. Breagh must make excuses.  The arrival being
unlooked-for and the notice very short."

"Dropped on you out of the skies, didn't he, Maria?" chuckled Mr.
Knewbit.  "And you've put him, for the present, in Mr. Ticking's bed!"

"In Mr. Ticking's bed!--Mr. Ticking," explained Miss Ling, turning to
the new arrival, "who rents our third-floor front, being in the
country for his holidays."

P. C. Breagh expressed the hope that Mr. Ticking would not be
offended.

"Lord bless you, no!" responded Mr. Knewbit.  "Ticking's an agreeable
feller.  He'd take you rather as a Boon than otherwise.  Contributes
a column of cheerful, gossipy items weekly to half-a-dozen of the
suburban and district newspapers that are springing up around us
like--like mushrooms.  Always on the look-out for copy--Ticking is!
Now Mounteney----"

"Mr. Mounteney--who is also away on his vacation, and rents the front
sitting-room on our ground-floor, and the bedroom behind it," said
Miss Ling, "is a gentleman who--owing to the nature of his
professional employment--is very refined and sensitive."

"Edits the Health and Beauty column of the _Ladies' Mentor_," said
Mr. Knewbit, crunching fried bread noisily, "and is altogether too
ladylike a gentleman to take a liberty with.  For the rest, we are
Full Up.  To begin with, I occupy a combined bed-and-sitting room
behind this kitchen, and Miss Ling occupies the large front garret
bedroom; the back one being partitioned off as a Box and Lumber room,
and a bedroom for the servant gal, who is now having her breakfast in
the scullery, as me and Miss Ling agreed would be more considerate
toward you....  Coming down again to the first-floor, the front
parlor and back bedroom are rented by a German gentleman, Mr. Van
Something----"

"Herr von Rosius," interpolated Miss Ling, "who is a teacher at the
Institute of Languages in Berners Street....  Second-floor front,
another combined bed-and-sitting ... Monsieur Meguet, a French
gentleman who is studying Prints at the British Museum.  Second-floor
back, Miss Kindell, who is a copier of Pictures at the National
Gallery, and a sweet artist.  Third-floor, Mr. Ticking----"

"You represent him for the present," said Mr. Knewbit, nodding at
Carolan.

"The trouble is, and I hope Mr. Breagh will forgive me for mentioning
it," hesitated Miss Ling, "that Mr. Ticking comes back to-morrow
night...."

"And when does Miss Morency go? ... Miss Morency," explained Mr.
Knewbit without waiting for an answer, "is a young person who don't
give satisfaction,--regarded as a lodger,--and there you have the
truth in a nutshell--Brazil for choice!  And Miss Ling's good-nature
has led her, before now, to take in such people, and be taken in by
'em too, I'm bound to say!"

The little man broke off as Miss Ling, mindful of P. C. Breagh's
flushed and uneasy countenance, coughed warningly.

"Miss Morency has been brought up very well, and is--she has told
me,--the daughter of a clergyman in Hertfordshire," she explained as
Mr. Knewbit buried his confusion in his coffee-cup.  "I cannot but
think it right--under the circumstances--to give Miss Morency a
little time to turn round."

"She's been turning round for eight weeks," said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing
his nose irritably.  "And--if I was you, I'd have my latchkey back."

"To ask it would be a want of confidence, which would wound Miss
Morency, and upset her," returned Miss Ling, who had risen and was
gathering the breakfast things together in rather an agitated way.
She added: "And willfully to hurt a person's feelings is a thing I
could not bring myself to do, Solomon.  And she goes out, evening
after evening, poor thing, to call on relatives who live in distant
parts of London, and is hardly ever back until very late indeed!"

"She come in at two o'clock this morning," said Mr. Knewbit, screwing
up his eyes meaningly at Carolan.  "And--being comparatively early
myself on Saturdays--I heard her--just as I was getting between the
sheets.  And being anxious to solve the problem as to Why a young
creature like that should go out walking on two feet--and them
remarkably small and pretty ones!--and come back with Four--and two
of 'em uncommon big and heavy ones, I slipped up the kitchen-stairs
and looked round the corner-post.  '_The seeing eye and the hearing
ear,_' said my namesake, '_the Lord hath made them both_' ... and
then, just as I was a-going to ring the garret-bell and bring you
down out of bed in your curl-papers, Maria, I remembered, '_Lie not
in wait for wickedness in the house of the just, nor spoil his
rest,_' 'him' being understood as 'her,' for you're a just woman!
But judgment must be executed upon the daughter of Rahab, whether
it's Sunday or whether it ain't!"

"When you begin quoting from the prophets, it takes a cleverer than
me to understand you," said Miss Ling, flushed to the top of her high
cheekbones.  "But as a woman that's her elder, I will stand up for
that poor unprotected young creature against any man that tries to
take her character away!"

"It's nearly time for the Prayer Meeting at the Headquarters Branch
Hall of your Christian Mission Army," said Mr. Knewbit, looking at an
enormous silver watch he wore, and always set by the Tower clock at
Westminster, and calmly taking the poker from the rail above the
kitchen-range.  "If you'll put on your bonnet and go, what I have
made up my mind to do will be comfortably over before the General, or
the Colonel, or whichever of 'em is set down to give you Blood and
Fire this morning, has fairly warmed to the fight.  But if you want
to be upset and made uncomfortable in your mind for a week
afterwards--you'll stop!  You will?  Very well, and why not in your
own house?  Mr. Breagh, will you kindly follow with Miss Ling and act
as Reserve Force in this emergency?  I thank you, young gentleman!"

And armed with the poker, Mr. Knewbit left the kitchen, followed by
Carolan and the landlady, closely attended by the ginger kitten, and
mounted the stairs to the third-floor back.




XVI

It was a sordid little scene that followed, but for the sake of the
good woman whose unaffected charity and kindly feeling illumined its
murky darkness, it shall be recorded here....


Mr. Knewbit, arriving at Miss Morency's door, thumped on it,
receiving no answer beyond the hurried shooting of the bolt, and the
scuffling of slippered feet across the carpet.  Roused by the
meaningful silence to indignation, he delivered himself in the
following terms:

"You inside there--and you're aware why I don't address you as a
young lady!--I'm going to trouble you to unfasten that door!"

"No, you ain't!" said a feminine voice from within, defiantly.  "Go
downstairs and shave yourself, you silly old man!"

A thickish masculine chuckle greeted this sally.

"When we have got you and your companion out of this respectable
house," quoth the wrathful Mr. Knewbit, "I may have time to attend to
my Sunday twylett.  Not before!  Are you a-going to undo this door?
Because, if you won't, I am a-going to bust it with the poker!
Once!"  He applied the end of the weapon named to a panel with a
crack in it.  "Twice!----"

"Stop!" cried Miss Ling, and Mr. Knewbit lowered the poker.  "One
moment, Solomon!--I want to speak to her!"

Forgetful of her neat Sabbath attire, she went down upon her knees
before the door, as Mr. Knewbit joined P. C. Breagh upon the
staircase, and laid her work-worn hand as gently and persuasively
upon the threatened panel, as if it had been a human bosom housing an
obdurate heart.

"Miss Morency!  Don't be afraid, my dear!  Maria Ling it is
a-speaking to you!"  She waited an instant, and receiving no
response, went on.

"Mr. Knewbit has got it in his head--he best knows why!--that you're
not Alone in that room, in a manner of speaking....  Open the door
and prove to him he's wrong; or tell me on your solemn honor--before
the God who made you and me both women!--that he's mistaken, and I'll
believe you--and ask your pardon--and we'll all go downstairs again!"

There was a silence within the room, and then a thick whispering
voice and a thin whispering voice held indistinct colloquy.  P. C.
Breagh and Mr. Knewbit exchanged looks, Miss Ling grew pale, rose,
and withdrew from the door.  Her clean Sunday handkerchief was in her
hand and the hand shook, and her mouth was shut tightly, as, with
much shuffling, an obstacle--probably a chest of drawers--was removed
from the other side, the key was turned, and the bolt withdrawn.

The door opened.  The defiant figure and the angry painted face of a
good-looking young woman were revealed beyond the threshold.  She
wore a gaudy dressing-gown trimmed with cheap lace, and a butterfly
cap in the prevailing mode was set upon her mound of dyed hair.  Her
companion might have been the manager of a restaurant, or a West End
shopwalker.  His face was sallow with debauch, and his eyes were red
from liquor or sleeplessness.  With the rosebud of the previous night
still drooping in the buttonhole of his fashionably cut frock-coat,
and the mud of the previous night soiling his trouser-ends and his
shiny boots and drab spats, and his silk hat fixed firmly on his head
as though in anticipation of a scuffle, he stood behind the woman;
maintaining a sulky silence, gripping his cane in a hand that was
mottled and shaky.  And the roll of his eyes said "Two of 'em!" as
his glance took in Mr. Knewbit and P. C. Breagh.

Said the rouged, defiant young woman in the flyaway cap, turning a
glare of defiance upon her landlady:

"You see now whether that"--she employed a term reflecting on the
moral character of her assailant--"was mistaken, or whether he
wasn't, I hope?"

Returned Miss Ling, looking mildly at the brazen countenance:

"I see!  May the Lord forgive you, poor ruined young creature.  But
for Him having given me a good, good mother, I might be standing
where you are now!"

"Never!" said Mr. Knewbit under his breath.  The kind soul went on
without heeding him:

"Were you led away? ... Was it the first time? ... Whether or no,
it's not too late to change, and lead a life of decency.  As for
this--man...."

The young woman interrupted, with lowered eyes shunning her:

"We're to be married!  He's promised me upon his oath!"

Her companion purpled furiously, and broke out:

"You're lying, you----!  I picked you up in the Haymarket!  Do you
think I'm afraid of you and your bullies there?  Stand back!"

Fulminating threats, he thrust roughly past Miss Ling, driving her,
possibly not with intention, against the landing wall.  She gave a
little cry, and the poker fell....  He bellowed:

"---- you!  You've broken my arm, you--blackguard!  Where's the
police?"

A grip of steel shut upon his scruff, and the voice belonging to the
grip said cheerfully:

"In the street.  Come down and look for 'em, my man!"

His protests were drowned in the rattling of his boot-heels on the
oil-cloth-covered staircase, in the violence of his transit to the
ground-floor.  There, as Mr. Knewbit, dodging past, opened the hall
door, he was shot from its threshold as a human bullet from a
spring-cannon, even then supplying a sensational turn at the Royal
Alhambra Theater--rolled down the steps, gathering momentum, and
colliding with a late milk-truck that happened to be passing,
suffered abrasions and the ruin of his smart frock-coat.  Leaving the
victim of righteous judgment to appease the justly-indignant milkman
with some of the silver shed from his trousers-pockets in the
transit, Mr. Knewbit slammed the door, and crowed, slapping P. C.
Breagh heartily upon the back.

"Neatly done!  You could get a well-paid job as pitcher-out at a West
End bar, if you'd nothing better than your muscles to rely upon....
Wait a bit!"  He vanished upstairs, walking as softly as a cat does,
to return and explain:

"The pumps are at work up there!  Both of 'em crying--Rahab's
Daughter and Solomon's Virtuous Woman, I mean....  You remember the
text?  '_Her price is above rubies._'  I remembered it when I saw her
sitting dropping tears upon that trollop's head, that was a-lying in
her lap.  Well, well!"  He led the way down into the kitchen,
muttering, "'_As golden pillars upon bases of silver, so are the firm
feet upon the soles of a steady woman...._' and '_Her husband's heart
delighteth in her!_'  Sit down, you must want a breather ...
'_Delighteth in her_'--or would have if she'd married one capable of
appreciating a character like hers."

Seeing that the mind of Mr. Knewbit was still running upon Miss Ling,
P. C. Breagh ventured to ask:

"And has she never entertained any intention of----"

Mr. Knewbit nodded sagely.

"Once.  You might say--there has been a Romance in her life, without
exaggeration.  When in service with that family of Nobs you've heard
her mention,--about twenty-four years ago, when she was a strapping
young woman of twenty-six--she got engaged to an underbutler--a young
man with an affectionate nature and a changeable disposition, in
conjunction with weak lungs.  Weak lungs----"

Mr. Knewbit opened the oven-door and looked in to ascertain how the
mutton and Yorkshire pudding were getting on.  "I've had weak lungs
myself, but never found 'em an excuse for villainy!  Mph! ... Don't
smell like burning--pretty right, it seems to me!"

He sat down in his Windsor arm-chair near the hearth, stretched out
his carpet-slippered feet, and broke out:

"So--in the interests o' them weak lungs of his, his master's son,
Lord Wallingbrook--to whom he sometimes acted as valet, took him in
that capacity on a steam-yacht-trip from Plymouth, via Trinidad to
the Southern Seas.  And they cruised among the Islands of the Pacific
for months--a gay party of bachelors amusing themselves!--and--in the
Paumotu Group--this precious young man of Maria's up-stick and took
French leave....  And that's all.  And whether his master knew more
than he'd tell--that's uncertain.  Anyhow, a letter arrived six
months after the steam-yacht dropped anchor at Plymouth, to say that
he was safe and well and happy--but was never coming Home any more.
And she believes ... 'Ssh!  Here she is!"

It was Miss Ling, who had been crying, undoubtedly, for her Sunday
bonnet-strings were spotted as with rain, and her clean handkerchief
was reduced to a damp wad.  Said she:

"I have talked to that poor thing upstairs, as a woman of my age is
privileged to do.  And she has softened wonderful, Solomon, and from
what she has owned--has seen the shame and wickedness of her life
clear, and longed to be delivered from it--this many and many a day,
I'm sure!  So if you'll kindly whistle up a four-wheeler, I'll make
bold--being late for the speaking at the Judd Street Branch Hall!--to
take her down to the Christian Mission Army Headquarters in the
Whitechapel Road.  Where I shall find not only the General, as they
call Mr. Booth, but Mrs. Booth, ready and willing, please Heaven! to
help the poor soul to a better life!  And though Lilla has gone home
to spend Sunday with her mother at Southampton Mews, I'll stop there
passing and send a note in, and she'll come round and dish up
dinner--and don't you, either of you, dream of waiting a minute for
me!  Now, I'm going back to Miss Morency--though her real name is
nothing like so grand as that, poor creature!"

She turned at the door to nod and smile and say: "And her and me will
carry down her box between us, so don't show yourselves to shame her
poor swelled face before the cabman."


"There's a woman!" said Mr. Knewbit exultantly, a few minutes later,
as the hall-door shut and the cab-door banged, and the vehicle
containing the Daughter of Rahab and the Woman Above Rubies rattled
away in the direction of Holborn Circus.

"I wonder you----" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when he stopped
himself on the brink of an indiscretion.

"Eh?..." interrogated Mr. Knewbit.  "What? ... Oh, but I did, though!"

Mr. Knewbit rubbed his chin, which needed shaving, and shook his head
in a despondent way.

"I did.  She was thirty-one when the Earl and Countess pensioned
her--thirty-one pound a year For Life they promised....  And it's
been paid regularly, going on for nineteen year now.  And in the
second year I came to lodge here early in January, and finding her a
comfortable, cleanly, kindly creature, I stopped on--and all but
asked her to marry me next time New Year came round.  On the
following anniversary I took the plunge! after reading a passage of
Solomon's peculiarly applicable to my case.  '_He that hath found a
good wife hath found a good thing,_' it was.  Turned it up by
accident, and showed it to her, and asked her.  And she said No!  And
goes on saying it--though I ask her for the last time regularly every
year.  Here's the gal coming down the area-steps.  Now that meat and
pudding's off my conscience, I shall put on my boots for an airing
before dinner.  And while I'm gone--try your hand at a neat article
in moderate paragraphs describing the methods of that"--Mr. Knewbit
cast about for a new term--"that Man-eating Alligator in the Euston
Road.  What was the name of the place?  'Royal Copenhagen Hotel!' ...
Why, it fairly smells of roguery!  'Royal Greenhorn' would be pretty
well up to the mark."

Mr. Knewbit returned, just as the little servant pronounced dinner to
be in danger of spoiling--in a cab; and thereupon ensued much jolting
and bumping, suggestive of the conveyance of heavy articles up the
doorsteps into the hall.  Where, being summoned from the kitchen by a
bellow, P. C. Breagh recognized his own trunks and book-boxes, and
wrung the hand of his good genius with a grateful swelling of the
heart, and an irrepressible watering of the eyes.

"It was so kind!--and suppose I never am able to pay you--or keep you
waiting a devil of a time?" he protested incoherently.

"Young fellow," said Mr. Knewbit, scowling with his heavy brows and
twinkling pleasantly from under them.  "You are a gentleman born and
bred and taught.  You must have your Books to keep up your Latin and
Greek and other learning--and to keep up your appearance you must
have your clothes.  No man is so down in the world that he can afford
to go downer.  This is my opinion, and also Miss Ling's!"

"And to-morrow Mr. Breagh will find poor Miss Morency's room swept
and scrubbed and got ready for him," said Miss Ling that evening,
during Mr. Knewbit's absence.  "And the rent is--including Kitchen
Board with myself and Mr. Knewbit, who likes homeliness, sixteen
shillings per week.  And if I trust Mr. Breagh for a month--that will
be a chance for him of getting work to do.  And that he will turn
from nothing that will bring him in an honest living, I am certain;
and that he will justify the confidence of Mr. Knewbit, I am equally
sure!"

Said P. C. Breagh, rather chokily:

"I hope to God I may one day be able to thank you both as I should
like to!  You don't know what you have done for me, either of you!
But I will--will repay you, I swear!"

She said in her quaint way:

"What obligation there may be could be repaid now--with Mr. Breagh's
permission.  He saw that most unhappy girl to-day....  He has seen
a-many--many like her!  If he would promise me--never to bring about
a fall like that, or help to drag a head so fallen, lower!  Perhaps I
take a liberty," said Miss Ling, "and presume, being almost a
stranger....  Yet I ask it of Mr. Breagh, I do indeed!"

He gave the promise, in words that were broken and hurried, and with
eyes that shunned her plain, kind, earnest face.  She said:

"There will be a beautiful young lady, one of these days, all the
happier for that promise Mr. Breagh has given.  And I hope he won't
think me unjust--because I am a woman! and blind to the wreck and
ruin that my sex can bring about.  I knew a young man, once; who was
good, and honest, and worthy; and engaged to marry a young person of
his own rank in life...."

Carolan remembered Mr. Knewbit's story of the faithless underbutler.

"He went Abroad to Foreign Countries," said Miss Ling, mildly,
"sailing on a ship that voyaged for months at a time.  I am told that
the women are very beautiful in the islands that he visited; and
somehow or another, he was led away...."

Though she looked at Carolan, her regard was curiously impersonal.
It was as though she saw the wraith of some face once dear, and
although changed, never to be forgotten, appear within the outlines
of the face that looked back at her.

"The ship sailed Home without him.  He wrote--by another vessel--to
the young woman he was to have married, begging her forgiveness....
He had loved her, he said, and looked to be happy with her.  But the
sunshine and perfume and color of them foreign places, and the spell
of the beauty of their wild brown foreign women was over him.  He
could not come back....  He never may come back again....  But if it
happened so--and he, being old and worn, and weary of strange ways
and distant places, was looking for an honest roof to shelter him,
and a loving heart to lean upon at the last...."

"He would find both here, I know!" said Carolan, gently.

She started and, recalling herself, said in a changed tone:

"Mr. Breagh must excuse my having delayed him here a-talking.  To
work and bustle is more natural to me!"

He took her hand, and having learned in Germany to pay such pretty
homage without looking foolish, he stooped above it and touched it
with his lips.  She smiled her wise, kind smile, and said with a
touching simplicity:

"Mr. Breagh is good enough to honor a poor, hard, working hand!"

He said, and the tone had the ring of sincerity:

"I wish, with all my heart, I were worthier of touching it!"

And so went upstairs to sleep in Mr. Ticking's bed.




XVII

"My student-cap and _schläger_ and the silver-mounted beer-horn the
English Colony gave me, and my mother's Crucifix" found their places
on the walls of the clean and comfortable room, and upon cheap
stained-deal shelves the books of which Mr. Knewbit had spoken so
respectfully were ranged, waiting to refresh their owner's memory
whenever he chose to dip into them.

The sharkish manager of the "Royal Copenhagen Hotel" had been cowed
into giving up the detained luggage by Mr. Knewbit's assurance that
the story of his knavery was even then taking literary form under the
skilled hand of a young and aspiring journalist of his (Knewbit's)
own acquaintance, and might shortly appear in a newspaper to the
confusion of the said manager, unless the property was surrendered
upon payment of a corrected version of the bill.

These terms being hastily accepted, the Rules of Fair Play, according
to Mr. Knewbit, demanded that the written record of the manager's
iniquity should be consigned to Miss Ling's kitchen-fire.

"Not that it ain't a pity, for it ain't half bad for a beginner,
though wanting in what I call snap and sparkle.  But honor is
honor--and if Mr. Ticking reads this knowing you're not going to use
it--you'll find the story cropping up presently in the _Camberwell
Clarion_ or the _Islington Excelsior_....  Couldn't you do something
else--just for a taster?  Or haven't you something finished and put
away and forgot?"

P. C. Breagh finally disinterred from the litter of manuscript notes
at the bottom of a book-box, a scrawled description of a duel between
two Freshmen at a well-known tavern and concert-room outside the
walls of Schwürz-Brettingen.  The humors of the battle, waged in a
low-ceiled room in the upper story, crowded with chaffing, drinking,
smoking students; the marvelous nature of the defensive armor worn by
the inexperienced _Füchse_, the blows that fell flat, the final
entanglement of their swords, and abandonment of these unfamiliar
weapons in favor of fisticuffs, made Mr. Knewbit chuckle, and won the
suffrages of Mr. Ticking; who said the fight and the bit of
knock-about at the end was nearly good enough to be put on at the
Halls.

Mr. Ticking was a journalist who possessed a knack of rhyme, penned
comic ditties for Lion Comiques, when these gentlemen would sing
them,--and lived in the hope of getting a Burlesque produced at a
West-End Theater one day.  He had educated himself because you
couldn't get on if you were not educated.  He could not have
explained to you how the process had been carried out.  By
dexterously angling matter for short paragraphs from the swirl of
happenings about him, he contrived--between the _Camberwell Clarion_,
the _Islington Excelsior_, and the _Afternoon_, a late daily
published in Fleet Street--to net some three pounds at the end of
each week.  Thirty shillings of this went to support an aged and
invalid mother resident at Brixton; and if you had lauded Mr. Ticking
as a heroic exemplar of filial virtues, he would have been
excessively surprised.  Though if you had told him that he wrote
Burlesque better than Byron, he would have believed you implicitly.

Mr. Mounteney, Miss Ling's ladylike gentleman, proved to be a tall,
stout, elderly, rather depressed individual, whose gold-rimmed
glasses, attached to a broad black ribbon, sat a little crookedly
upon a high, pink Roman nose.  His light blue eyes were over-tried
and rather watery, his hair had come off at the top, leaving his
crown bald and shiny; his customary attire was a rather seedy black
frock-coat, a drab vest with pearl buttons, and rather baggy brown
trousers, and he wore turned-down collars and black ribbon neckties,
and displayed onyx studs and links in a carefully preserved shirt.
Pieces of paper protected his cuffs, invariably covered with
memoranda written in violet-ink-pencil, referring to the most
delicate and confidential affairs.

For Mr. Mounteney, under the _nom de guerre_ of "Araminta," edited
the "Happiness, Health, and Beauty" column of that fashionable
feminine monthly, the _Ladies' Mentor_, into whose bureau, according
to Mr. Mounteney, a vast correspondence,--penned by the wives and
daughters of what Mr. Mounteney termed the Flower of Britain's
Nobility and Gentry, as by their governesses and maids, and the wives
and daughters of their butchers, bakers, and
candlestick-makers,--continually flowed.  Signing themselves by fancy
names, these confiding ones would put questions concerning matters of
the toilette and so forth, the Answers to which interrogations, with
the pseudonyms prefixed, were inserted month by month.


"_Little Fairy_.--A lady who weighs fourteen stone need not
necessarily give up waltzing.

"_Ruby_.--We should recommend you to powder it.

"_Ravenlocks_.--To stand in the sun too soon after applying is
prejudicial to a successful result.

"_Peri_.--Try peppermint."


Or the bosom of Araminta, guarded by the onyx studs and the black
pince-nez ribbon, would be made, according to its owner, the
receptacle of confidences calculated, if revealed, to convulse
Society to its core.  Thus burdened with secrets, it weighed heavily
on Mr. Mounteney.  When lachrymose with gin-and-water, to which
cooling beverage he was rather addicted, he would with tears deplore
the wreck of a once noble constitution, caused by reason of emotional
strain.  But he never gave any of his correspondents away.  And being
of a kindly disposition, he induced the Editor of the _Ladies'
Mentor_ to read and accept a brief, mildly-humorous article,
descriptive of a German ladies' cake-and-coffee party; the details
having been long ago previously supplied by a fellow-student at
Schwärz-Brettingen, and worked up by P. C. Breagh.

Several other social paragraphs by the same hand found their way,
thanks to Mr. Ticking's introduction, into the columns of the
_Islington Excelsior_.  In recognition, P. C. Breagh, producing pairs
of basket-hilted swords, pads, cravats and goggles from one of the
cases rescued from the hotel manager, instructed Mr. Ticking in the
noble art of fence.

Their thrusts, lunges and stampings seriously threatening the
stability of the third-floor landing, these combats were transferred
to the back-yard in fine weather, and permitted in the kitchen when
it was wet.  And Mr. Ticking, though he never mastered the science of
the _schläger_, inducted P. C. Breagh into the mysteries of boating
and velocipeding,--having a cutter-rigged Thames sailing-boat in
housing near Chelsea Bridge Stairs, and a huge-wheeled bone-shaker of
the prevailing type stowed away in a decrepit conservatory adjoining
the bathroom on Miss Ling's second floor.

Mr. Mounteney could not be prevailed upon to handle what he
stigmatized as "deadly weapons," or to risk his person on the
whirling wheel, while even fresh-water boating caused him to suffer
from symptoms not distantly resembling those peculiar to the malady
of the ocean.  But, flabby as the ladylike gentleman appeared, he was
a vigorous and tireless pedestrian, able to reduce Mr. Ticking, who
was not unhandy in the usage of his feet, into a human pulp, and walk
Mr. Knewbit, who had reason to pride himself upon his powers of
locomotion, completely off his legs.

Expeditions were made to Addiscombe, in the green swelling Surrey
country, where the once famous East India College was founded in
1812, and sold and dismantled in 1858 upon the transfer of the
Company to the Crown.  Of the 3,600 cadets who were trained here, the
names of Lawrence, Napier, Durand, and Roberts are written upon the
rolls in letters of undimming gold.  Or to Sydenham with its acres of
glittering crystal, its matchless fountains, and the view from the
North Tower, extending over six counties and compassing the whole
course of the Thames.  Or to Ascot, with its stretches of sandy
heathland, its noble racecourse and its woods of fir and birch, would
the lady-like gentleman, accompanied by one or the other or both of
his young friends, betake himself upon a highday or a holiday, when
duchesses ceased from troubling and milliners were at rest.  Or they
would make for Hampton Court or Bushey Park, or the ancient manor of
Cheshunt, or to Chigwell, immortalized by Dickens, where in the
oak-wainscoted dining-room of the King's Head, such rare refreshment
of cold beef and salad, apple pie and Stilton cheese could be had,
and washed down by the soundest and brightest of ales; then even
"Araminta" was tempted to forget the crushing responsibilities
inseparable from the delicate position of adviser upon Health,
Happiness, and Beauty to the feminine flower of England's nobility
and gentry, and eat and drink like a navvy free from care.

And upon the return of the three wearied pedestrians from these
excursions, there would be a cheery supper in Mr. Ticking's room, or
in Mr. Mounteney's, or, best of all, in Miss Ling's clean and
comfortable kitchen, with more beer and more tobacco,--though by
reason of a digestion impaired by the continual wear and tear of his
fair clients' confidences, or by excessive indulgence in tea, Mr.
Mounteney restricted himself to the mildest of Turkish cigarettes.

Mr. Knewbit, who reveled in the growing popularity of his _protégé_,
though he might in secret have shaken his head over the articles and
paragraphs published in the _Ladies' Mentor_ and the _Islington
Excelsior_, learned very willingly to whistle a beer-waltz, knocking
the bottom of his tumbler on the table in time to the tune; to say
"_Prosit_" when he drank, and vocally unite in the final melodic
outburst of: "_O jerum, jerum, jerum, jerum, la la la!_"  In which
historic and legendary burden Miss Ling would also join, and laugh
until the tears ran down.


Of the junior-staff room of the _Early Wire_, a bare, gaunt place,
lighted by three seldom-washed windows looking on a sooty yard, or by
six flaring gas-jets by night or in foggy weather, Carolan was, by
the interest of Mr. Ticking, one day made free.  Names of power were
cut with penknives on the ink-splashed deal tables, and the bottoms
of the cane-seated chairs had given way under the weight of
personalities now famous, men who were paid for a single article as
much as Ticking earned in a year.

And thus P. C. Breagh joined the gallant company of the Free Lances
of Fleet Street, and very soon had its offices and eating-houses, its
haunts and traditions by heart.  What demi-gods walked upon those
historic flags and cobblestones!  Russell, the pioneer and King of
War Correspondents, and Simpson of Crimean fame, whose war-sketches
for the _Illustrated London News_ had set England ablaze in '54-5,
and George Augustus Sala, and Macready--long since retired from the
stage in 1870,--the veteran Charles Mathews and Byron of burlesque
fame, and Bulwer Lytton, and Tennyson and Browning, and Planche and
Edmund Yates, and genial, handsome Tom Robertson, who was to die,
with his laurels green upon him, in another year.  All these were
pointed out to the young man, with certain places rendered for ever
sacred by the footsteps of Dickens and Thackeray, and other of the
Immortals who have passed beyond these voices into peace.

And into the world of Music and the Drama, our fortunate youth, by
virtue of his initiation into the cheery brotherhood of Pressmen, was
now admitted.  There were free admissions for Popular Concerts where
one could hear Professor Burnett and Signor Piatti play the piano and
violoncello, and Santley most gloriously sing, and Sims Reeves
deliver Beethoven's incomparable "Adelaida" with that splendor of
voice and style that will never be surpassed.  The Christy Minstrels
of St. James's Hall beguiled our hero of a stealthy tear or two, and
made him roar with laughter; and Blanchard's Drury Lane Pantomime of
"Beauty and the Beast," with Kate Santley as Azalea, the Peri, and
Miss Vokes as the lovely Zemira, was an eye-opener to a youth who had
witnessed only provincial productions in his native country, and half
a dozen performances of Schiller's "Robbers," "Don Carlos," and "The
Stranger" of Kotzebu as given by a stock-company of Bavarian actors
at the Theater of Schwärz-Brettingen.

Also our hero was privileged to witness the performances of Mrs. Wood
as Miss Hardcastle in "She Stoops to Conquer," and afterwards in the
extravaganza of "La Belle Sauvage," at the St. James's Theater, and
J. S. Clarke, then drawing the town with "Amongst the Breakers" at
the Strand.

At the Olympic, Patti Josephs was touching the hearts of the British
Public as Little Em'ly, Rowe was tickling people to laughter with the
unctuosities and impecuniosities of Micawber, a certain Mr. Henry
Irving was holding his audiences spellbound with the sardonic slyness
and hypocritical cunning displayed in his performance of Uriah Heep,
and beautiful Mrs. Rousby was breaking hearts at the Queen's Theater.
And evenings spent with these, or with Professor Pepper at the
Polytechnic, or the German Reeds, who were playing Gilbert and
Sullivan's little operas, and "Cox and Box" at the Gallery of
Illustration,--were crowned by suppers in the grill-room of "The
Albion" in Drury Lane, or at Evan's at the north-west corner of
Covent Garden.  And these were merry times and merry mimes, my
masters, and we shall not look upon their like again.

And in the environment I have endeavored to depict, and with the
associates I have tried to delineate, and with the pleasant hum and
swirl of this new life setting the tune for his young pulses and
mingling with his blood, Carolan's temperament recovered its
elasticity, and his character developed apace.  The magic gift of
sympathy found in the gutter on that night of homeless, hungry
wandering was his now, never to be lost or alienated.  He had learned
much when he had discovered how to fit himself inside the ginger
kitten's ragged skin.

The bond of brotherhood, established between a shaggy-haired boy and
all other created beings capable of joy and susceptible to suffering,
would hold unbroken through all the years to come.  We are aware that
the confidence of Mr. Knewbit had been won that morning on Waterloo
Bridge, and we have heard Miss Ling (not ordinarily given to broach
the subject of the faithless underbutler) tell him in her simple way
of the desertion that had left her kind heart empty and sore.  We may
know also that Mr. Ticking revealed, with the fact of the existence
of the invalid mother resident at Brixton, the secret that he was
beloved by a certain Annie, the orphan daughter of a deceased
relative, who lived with the old lady as housekeeper and nurse.
Annie, it seemed, had a little fortune of her own, and was so kind,
so clever and so charming, that only the indiscreetly-evident anxiety
of Ticking's mother to bring about a match, and the too plainly
manifested willingness of Annie to accept the hand of Mr. Ticking,
were it offered--held him back from becoming an engaged man.  As it
was, he spoke, in somber whispers, of an amatory entanglement with a
splendid creature, not good as Annie was good, but possessing the
beauty in whose baleful luster honest prettiness pales, and the charm
whose sorcery kills the conscience, and wakens the scorching desires
of man.

"Passion!--there's no going against that, you know!" he would say,
wagging his head dismally, "and if ever you see Leah, you'll
understand."

But when P. C. Breagh did see Leah, who presided over the gaudy
necktie and imitation gold cuff-link department at an East Strand
hosier's, he failed to understand at all.  She had big burnt-out
dusky-brown eyes and loops of coarse black hair, and a big bust and a
tiny waist with a gilt dog-collar belt about it.  Ticking had paid
for the belt when he had taken her to the Crystal Palace, and she had
admired the trinket on one of the fancy stalls in the French Court
next the Great Concert Hall.  And there had been a display of
fireworks on the Terrace, and in the dark interval between two
set-pieces there had been a mutual declaration; and the moth Ticking
had singed his wings in the flame of illicit passion, and would
return to flutter about the candle, he supposed, until he met his
doom.

Mr. Mounteney spoke of Passion as well as Mr. Ticking, but in the
exhausted accents of a world-weary cynic who had drunk of the cup to
satiety.  He knew so much of women, thanks to "Araminta," that he had
nothing more to learn.  Yet when a pert and pretty waitress, who
served the table at which he commonly lunched at a Fleet Street
chop-house, proved ungrateful after six months of extra tips, trips
to Kew and Rosherville Gardens and innumerable theater tickets, and
told Mr. Mounteney in the plainest terms that he was "too bow-windowy
in figure for a beau," and that she preferred young swells on the
Stock Exchange to elderly newspaper gents, Mounteney--the expressed
preference having been illustrated by demonstration,--was tragically
comic in his manifestations of wounded vanity, quite funnily touching
in his display of jealousy and despair.  For a whole week following
the betrayal his pale blue eyes were suffused with tears, his Roman
nose was red, and his light hair stood up on end, where his
despairing fingers had rumpled it.  His black ribbon necktie
straggled untied over a limp shirt-front, the violet-ink-pencil
memoranda on his paper cuffs had merged into blotches and blurs.

Then suddenly his dismal countenance recovered its mild placidity,
his necktie was tied, his hair lay once more in smoothly brushed
streaks across his shining crown.  His nose paled, his eyes reverted
to their purely normal wateriness.  It seemed that nestling amid the
grasses at the feet of one who had plucked the fairest flowers that
bloom in the garden of Passion and sickened of their cloying perfume
and dazzling hues, the disillusioned Mounteney had discovered a
simple violet, and that the humble sweetness and modest beauty of
this shrinking blossom had refreshed his jaded senses and solaced his
wearied mind.

In terms less obscure, Mr. Ticking explained that the humble violet
was a certain Miss Rooper, who for a monthly salary attended at the
office of the _Ladies' Mentor_ thrice a week to assist in the
Herculean task of opening the letters addressed to "Araminta"--take
down in shorthand her representative's replies to the interrogations
therein contained--make notes of queries impossible to answer on the
spot, and ferret out the answers by application at such leading
centers of information as the Reading-room of the British Museum,
Heralds' College, the Zoological Gardens, the Doctors' Commons Will
Office, Marshall and Snelgrove's, Whiteley's, Parkins and Gotto's,
Twinings', the Burlington Arcade, Scotland Yard, and the Coöperative
Stores.  Ticking added that for years Miss Rooper had brought her
luncheon-sandwiches to the office in a velvet reticule, and consumed
them under cover of the lid of her desk, but that now, the lady being
regularly engaged to Mr. Mounteney, he supposed the couple would go
out to "Araminta's" usual ordinary arm-in-arm.  It would be a jolly
lark, he added, if Mounteney took his betrothed to his customary
table, as Flossie had already been thrown over by the young jobber
from Capel Court.

And when P. C. Breagh saw Flossie, who owned a turned-up nose (I
quote Mr. Ticking) that you might have hung your hat on, and when he
was introduced to Miss Rooper, who was on the shady side of
thirty-five and had a long sagacious equine face, and boasted a
fringe and chignon and waterfall of black hair as coarse as the mane
of a Shetland pony, and was bridled with bands of red velvet, as the
pony might have been,--and caparisoned with leather belts and
strappings garnished with steel rivets, and tossed her head when she
was coquettish, and whinnied when she laughed, and looked less like a
modest violet than anything else you could have imagined, he wondered
very much.  For Mr. Mounteney had spoken of Passion in connection
with the faithless Flossie, and by the latest bulletins his sentiment
for Miss Rooper had developed into Passion of the strictly honorable
kind.

Could the passion on which Shakespeare had strung the pearls and
rubies of Romeo and Juliet, and to which the lyre of Keats throbbed
out the deathless music of "Endymion" have anything in common with
the loves of Ticking and Leah, or the emotion wakened in the bosom of
Mr. Mounteney by Flossie and Miss Rooper?

Could the emotion of which Carolan himself was conscious, the sudden,
fierce, stinging temptation born of the bold glance of a pair of
painted eyes, ogling and laughing from under a clipped fringe and a
tilted hat, partake of the nature, be worthy of the designation?  For
Sin beckoned sometimes, and the boy would tug at his chain, forged of
links of instilled religion and honor, instinctive cleanliness and a
sensitive, secret shrinking from the purchase of something that was
never meant to be bartered or sold.


But there were times when, sitting at the rickety but useful and
capacious old davenport in the room from tenancy of which Miss
Morency had been ejected, the pen would hang idle between the fingers
of P. C. Breagh, and the article commissioned by the benevolent
editor of the Camberwell Clarion or the _Islington Excelsior_, or the
more ambitious magazine-story that was being written as a bait to
catch a literary reputation,--and would return as surely as the
swallow of the previous summer, from the editorial offices of
Blackwood's, or the _Cornhill_, or even _Tinsley's_--would hang fire.

With his elbows on the blotting-pad, exposing to view the shiny
places on the right-hand cuff of the old serge jacket, and his eyes
vaguely staring at the strip of London sky seen above the
chimney-pots of Bernard Street, P. C. Breagh would fall into a brown
study, a dreamy reverie of the kind to which hopeful Youth is prone.

The outer angles of the eyebrows would lift, giving an eager, wistful
look to the gray eyes that had specks of brown and golden dust in
them, the nostrils of the short, determined nose would expand as
though in imagination they were inhaling some rare, strange, delicate
fragrance,--the upper lip would lift at the corners, showing the
canines of the upper jaw--a mouth of this kind can be fierce, and yet
you have an example of it in the Laughing Faun.

A delicate, rushing sweetness would envelop, enter and possess him,
body and brain and mind and soul, and his heart would beat fiercely
for a minute or so, and then not seem to beat at all; and he would
scarcely be able to breathe for the strange new joy, and the subtle,
mysterious sense of being drawn to and mingled with the being of
another, some one wholly and unutterably beloved and dear....

A touch, light as a flower, would visit his forehead, and a voice,
small and silvery-clear, and with a liquid tremble in it that might
have been mirth or shyness, would sound in his ears again.  He would
sigh and lean back, shutting his eyes, and feel the slight yet firm
support of the delicate limbs and slender body, and the small soft
hand would stir and flutter in his palm like a captured bird, and he
would find himself painting in the choicest colors of his mental
palette upon the background of London sky or neutral-tinted
wall-paper--a face that was not in the least like
Krimhilde-Brünhilde's.  And then he would frown, and shake himself as
a red setter might have done, plunging back out of dripping sedges at
the sound of its master's whistle, and hurl himself savagely upon the
pile of blank pages before him, and never pause again until the daily
task was done.  Or--supposing this retrospective mood to have seized
him at the ending of his stint of labor, he would set his teeth,
summon up the image of his colossal beloved, and savagely add to her
inches all that she had lost since his meeting with the frozen
Infanta at the Convent, Kensington Square.  For the truth must be
told, and the painful fact faced,--that since that day the heroic
Ideal of P. C. Breagh had been steadily shrinking; and the hour was
coming when her golden tresses were to darken to the black-brown hue
of rain-soaked oak leaves in Winter,--when her roseate cheeks were to
blanch to the hue of old ivory, when her towering stature and robust
limbs were to dwindle to the slender shape and delicate extremities
of an elfin maiden's, and her late worshiper was shamelessly to dote
upon the change.

But had this been foretold to P. C. Breagh, he would have scouted the
prophet as an impostor, and laughed the prophecy to scorn.  Came a
day, when, fastidiously groomed, and dressed in well-cut, carefully
chosen clothes, he called upon Monica at the Convent, this time to
apprize her of the loss of his inheritance, and to assure her of his
present well-being, despite the change in his prospects brought about
by the defalcations of Mustey and Son.

He had not intended to ask after the Infanta; the query slipped out
quite accidentally.  But when Monica returned that by the latest
advice received from France, the health of Mademoiselle Bayard might
be pronounced excellent, the querist was conscious of a tightness
within his collar, and a sudden rush of blood reddened him to the
hair as his sister added:

"She may be 'Madame' and not 'Mademoiselle' to-day, since what date
is uncertain.  For her marriage was to take place almost instantly on
her return to Paris, she told us.  Her father--he is Colonel of the
777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard--had set his heart on
this--she worships him--she would consent to any sacrifice--would let
herself be cut to pieces if he but wished it.  Dear Juliette!"

P. C. Breagh got out, with difficulty, "Then--but--look here, doesn't
she love the fellow?"

The word last but three got out with difficulty.  His throat was hurt
by its passage.  He gulped as he stared at Monica, moistening his dry
lips.

"The fellow."  Her eyes widened.  "You don't call the
Colonel--that?..."

"Of course not.  I referred to the young lady's husband.  Actual or
yet expectant."  He boggled horribly in the attempt to seem natural
and at ease.  "Why should it be a sacrifice to obey her father--what
has the--the affair got in common with cutting to pieces if she--if
she----"

He stuck there.  Monica, of all Juliette's friends alone held worthy
to share the aching secret, had not been told, for her own peace of
mind.  Yet, loving much, she had seen much.  Now she sat silent.  But
a little line of distress came between her placid eyebrows, and tears
were gathering behind the beautiful, tender eyes, in readiness to
fall when next they might unseen.  Carolan went on, not looking at
her:

"She said he was a noble gentleman,--master of the sword, and brave
as a lion.  That doesn't suggest that she--would think herself
sacrificed in marrying him?"

A sigh heaved Monica's breast and exhaled unnoticed.  He mumbled with
a hangdog grace:

"Could you, when you happen to write, just give her a message?  Don't
ask what it means--it has to do with something we spoke of here the
other day when you were out of the room."

His eyes sought one particular square in the center of the beeswaxed
parquet, where he had sat leaning against the Infanta's knees.

"Tell her that the man--a fellow-student of mine at
Schwärz-Brettingen--realized not long after the--the girl--she will
remember the girl's name!--after the girl had made the offer--she
will not have forgotten what that was!--from how kind and generous a
heart it came.  And she will believe--she must believe!--that he has
loathed himself heartily for the brutal way in which he answered her.
And he entreats her to forgive, and he thanks her with all----"

Something splashed upon the clenched hand with which he had
unconsciously emphasized his utterance.  He wiped off the drop
furtively, and said, still not looking at Monica, but scowling at
that particular square in the middle of the parquet:

"With all his heart!  You won't forget?"

He made her promise it, and left her wondering.




XVIII

Being a daughter of France, and a Parisienne to the finger-tips, it
could not be that the return to Paris, delightful capital where all
the brilliancy, _esprit_, good taste, and refinement of modern life
were concentrated, should fail to rejoice the heart of Mademoiselle
de Bayard.  Her characteristic quality of humor, a trait not derived
from the paternal strain, made her omit three items from the list of
purchases commanded by M. le Colonel.  To supply oneself beforehand
with a complete bridal costume in the view of immediate union with a
husband never to one's knowledge previously beheld, could anything be
more outrageously impossible!  Juliette knew that she would titter
hysterically behind the stately backs of the powdered and
frock-coated gentlemen who parade Departments, and probably laugh to
madness in the faces of the powdered and frizzled young ladies who
should seek to minister to her needs.

And so, though the fresh and charming toilettes of the evening, the
promenade and the theater, with the suitable lingerie, were added to
Juliette's wardrobe, the nuptial robe, crown, and veil remained
unbought.

Paris, a seething pot since the Auteuil assassination early in that
January, was in a state of ebullition upon Juliette's return.
Passing in a _fiacre_ along the Champs Élysées, the progress of
Mademoiselle's hired vehicle was stopped.  A regiment of mounted
Chasseurs and a detachment of the Guides blocked the Avenue to stem
the black torrents of people rolling toward Neuilly, to attend the
funeral of the murdered journalist Victor Noir.  The National Guards
occupied the Place de la Concorde, and in front of the Corps
Législatif was a battalion of infantry, besides a force of _sergents
de ville_.  Yet by other thoroughfares inky streams of men and women
poured steadily nor'-west, and a vast concourse packed the Passage
Massena, where the dead man had lived, and when his coffin was
brought out, weeping friends unharnessed the bony black horses from
the shabby hearse, and six of them, hugging the pole, drew it to the
Cemetery.

But no speeches were made, though an instant previous to the lowering
of the coffin a disheveled, red-eyed woman leaped upon the plinth of
a memorial column that neighbored the grave dug in the Jewish quarter
of the Cemetery, and shrieked:

"He was only twenty-two, and was to have been married in a few days!
Vengeance upon the nephew of the Corsican wild boar!  Death to the
murderer Bonaparte and all his bloody race!..."

The rest was lost in the strangled whoopings of hysteria.  But upon
the ten thousand faces that had turned her way a crimson glow was
thrown, as though, the sun of Imperial glory were indeed about to
set, and a yell went up that might have reached the ears of the
princely homicide lodged in the Conciergerie by order of his Imperial
relative, pending that extravagant farce of the Tribunal of Tours.
There was a rush of police, and the woman was pulled down and
spirited away, it is said, by Revolutionists!  But the _Marseillaise_
had already cried more loudly than the red-eyed woman, and had been
heard to greater effect.  Indeed, upon the previous day M. Rochefort
had attended the tribune of the Corps Législatif, and protested in
the name of the people against the decree ordering for the trial of
the noble criminal a Special High Court of Justice composed of Judges
notoriously amenable to Imperial influence;--proceeding to draw
between Bonapartes and Borgias some extremely uncomplimentary
parallels.

The newspaper was seized upon the morning of the interment at
Neuilly, and its editor and proprietor served on behalf of the Crown
with a writ of prosecution for libel, by the special authorization of
the Corps Législatif.  Thus M. Rochefort was rendered too late for
the ceremony.  But one of the huge crowds of assistant mourners,
rolling back upon Paris, encountered him, in a hackney cab on one of
the boulevards, and the human torrent surging and eddying about the
vehicle, turned it round; and so rolled and roared with it and its
occupant in triumph to his home.

The savage faces, the sinister cries, the significant tokens of
popular disaffection and incipient revolt affected Mademoiselle
Bayard but little, it must be owned.  Her dear Parisians were for
some reason boiling over.  How many times had she not beheld them in
a state of ebullition?  French blood is easily heated, see you well!
A little patience and the people would quiet down.

In the eyes of Juliette and how many other daughters of the Empire,
the personality of the stoutish little gentleman with the heavy
sallow face, dull regard, spiky mustache and dyed brown chin-tuft was
invested with an aureole of semi-divinity.  To her as to her sisters,
the Emperor stood for France.

Born nineteen years before in the very month of the Coup d'État of
1851, what should she know of the betrayals, treacheries, crimes that
had been so many steps in the ladder leading the man on to success.
A tidal wave of human blood had set him upon the throne of St. Louis;
the Church, first duped, afterward to be shorn by him of power, had
poured her hallowed oils upon his head; titles, dignities, gold, had
streamed from his open hands upon his supporters; the tradition of
the Army that had throned him was devotion to his name.

And Juliette was a soldier's daughter.  How, then, not reverence the
Emperor, from whose ermined purples Field-Marshal's bâtons, Grand
Crosses of the Legion of Honor, coveted commands, desired steps,
constantly dropped.  That the blind, unreasoning support hitherto
accorded to him by the Army was weakening,--that 50,000 private
soldiers' votes would be recorded against him in the forthcoming
_plebiscitum_,--how was a mere girl to conceive of this?

That her beloved Paris, transformed by him into the gayest and most
splendid of European capitals, was tottering on the verge of
bankruptcy, she would not have believed.  Had she been told that High
Finance is too often synonymous with knavish trickery, that those who
carry out great civic works may drain treasuries of the national
millions--it would have conveyed nothing to her.  You cannot talk to
a school-girl in the shibboleth of the Bourse.

But one sign of the trend of popular resentment etched itself as by a
biting acid on her memory.  When the sulky driver of the ramshackle
vehicle pulled up in the Avenue of the Champs Élysées, in obedience
to the upraised sword-arm and authoritative voice of a lieutenant of
mounted Chasseurs, Juliette, thrilling with girlish delight at the
sight of the dear, familiar uniform, let down the window and thrust
forth her charming head.  And at that moment a party of four
equestrians, followed by two grooms in the Imperial livery, came
galloping westward, from the direction of the Pont Royal.

Pray picture to yourself the congested condition of this part of the
Avenue, the squadron blocking its throat, the halted cab, and the
lengthy queue of phaetons, Americaines, britzkas, dogcarts, and
Victorias, forming up on the left hand of the road to rear of it,
containing ladies old and young, pretty or plain, accompanied by the
males of their species; while nursemaids pushing babies in
perambulators, elderly gentlemen out for constitutionals, and other
harmless pedestrians, were marshaled on the right, under the
surveillance of imperious policemen, who meddled not at all with
certain isolated clumps of somber-looking persons dressed in black;
broken links of one of the huge processions of mourners, checked upon
their way to the Cemetery at Neuilly.

There was a stir of interest, and every eye was drawn to the little
cavalcade, previously mentioned, whose leaders, seeing the barrier of
humanity, horseflesh and steel drawn across the thoroughfare, checked
their horses and came forward at a walk.  Military Governor was
written large upon a double-chinned, stiff-necked, gray-mustached and
imperialed personage who bestrode a high-actioned brown charger, and
wore the undress uniform of a General of Division of the Service of
Engineers.  When he leaned to speak in the ear of the slender,
brown-haired, blue-eyed boy who rode upon his right hand, you saw in
the wearer of the glossy silk topper, the accurately cut,
single-breasted black coat and dark gray-strapped trousers--ending in
the daintiest of little polished boots, with gold spurs--the heir of
the Imperial throne of France.

A cocked-hatted, white-plumed Imperial _aide-de-camp_ in
blue-and-gold, and a green-and-silver Palace equerry followed in
attendance, succeeded at a respectful distance by two grooms in the
livery of the Tuileries; and a troop of the glorious beings known as
Cent Gardes came clattering after, balanced to a hair on their shiny,
prancing black horses, the long white horse-tails streaming from
their polished steel helmets, with tricolored side-plumes and eagled
brass plates, their brass-nutted steel cuirasses reflecting their
lacquered mustaches and the adoring glances of enamored femininity,
their sky-blue tunics with the scarlet and golden collars, their
golden epaulettes and aiguillettes, their gauntleted gloves of white
leather, their skin-tight breeches of snowy buckskin, their
brilliantly polished boots with huge brass roweled, steel-spiked
spurs, glancing and dancing, clinking and twinkling in the sun.

Ah me!  Their morals were doubtful, those mustached and chin-tufted
Antinouses of the Guard, as not only giddy work-girls and milliners,
but fast variety actresses and frisky ladies of fashion were
perfectly aware.  But they were splendid, stately, expensive
creatures, and so worthy to clatter at Imperial heels.

And so gallant was the youthful figure they attended and guarded; so
well-graced the seat upon the spirited English chestnut, so light the
boyish hand upon the mare's snaffle-rein, so frank and debonair the
smile with which he acknowledged the scanty salutations of a few of
the bystanders; that Juliette's heart flew to him with her eyes, and
there broke from her in a voice so clear and thrilling that the
object of her homage started in his saddle:

"_Vive le Prince!  Vive le Prince Impérial!_"


The French are tender to youth and beauty, accessible to sentiment,
lovers of Romance.  Other voices joined in the cry, hats not
ominously furbished with crape were lifted in salutation; a charming
dignity was manifested in the boy's reception of these tokens of
good-will.

You can conceive the picture, set in the beautiful scenery of the
Champs Élysées, to the roll of carriages in the great avenues, the
glint of wintry sunshine on still or leaping water, the nip of keen
sweet air, perfumed with the scent of damp grass and dead leaves and
wood-smoke.  Delicate tracery of branches as yet bare, interspersed
with the hardy green of pines, laurels, and larches against a sky
pale blue as harebell, streaked with broad floating scarves of
gray-white vapor, made a background for the green-jacketed,
red-breeched Chasseurs on their bony, brown horses,--for the knots of
strollers, curious or contemptuous,--for the broken masses of the
crowd of would-be demonstrators, arrested in their progress by the
blocking of the way.  In the right foreground suppose the slim young
Napoleon sitting easily on the fidgety, fretful chestnut,--the
Military General balanced on his big champing charger,--the
blue-and-gold aide and the green-and-silver equerry, the grooms and
the escort of Cent Gardes looking decorously between the ears of
their well-trained, shining beasts.  To the left place the
debilitated _fiacre_ with its weary Rosinante and red-nosed sulky
Jehu, and leaning from the open window of the vehicle--Juliette.

Perhaps you can see her, a little toque of Persian lambskin, with a
blue wing in it, on her high-piled hair,--with a coquettish jacket of
corduroy-velvet of the shade known in the spring of that year as
Bismarck gray,--trimmed with the lambskin, fitting close to her
slender shape.  She wore a plain black silk skirt looped high over a
vivid red cloth petticoat--it was a fashionable style of costume that
year--and very much worn.  A bright rose bloomed in each cheek, pale
as she was ordinarily; and her black brows were spread and lifted
joyously, and her eyes shone blue as sapphires in contrast with a
little knot of violets at her breast and the big bunch held in her
little gray-gloved hand.  And with a very fair aim she threw the
latter so that the bundle of wet fragrance lightly hit the saddleflap
close to the knee of the Imperial stripling, and behind the shoulder
of the swerving chestnut, as she cried again:

"_Vive le Prince Impérial!_"

The boy bowed to her, blushing at her beauty and her loyal
enthusiasm,--the equerry, slimmest of the officers in attendance,
dismounted and picked up the flowers.  A trumpet sounded, a short,
sharp order was given, there was a trampling of hoofs and a clinking
of bridles as the files wheeled right and left, leaving a broad road
open between a double rank of saluting troopers, and the Prince with
his Governor and following rode down this open vista and cantered
away by route of the Avenue de l'Impératrice, in the direction of the
Bois de Boulogne.

The boy held in his whip-hand the bunch of violets handed him by the
equerry.  Only a little grayish sand clung to some of the dark,
shining leaves.  He sniffed their fragrance and glanced back as the
trumpet rang out behind them, and the Avenue was once more blocked
with mounted Chasseurs.




XIX

He was fourteen, delicate and rather backward for his age, owing to
the inevitable drawbacks of his environment.  Since the salvo of a
hundred-and-one guns announcing the birth of a Prince Imperial had
crashed from the battery of the Esplanade of the Invalides, to be
echoed from every fortress throughout the Empire; and bells had
pealed from every steeple, flags had broached from every staff-head,
and dusk-fall had seen every city, town, or village, ablaze with
illumination,--had he not been environed with precautions, lapped in
luxury?  Where another baby would have slumbered in a wicker
bassinette, the child of France cried in a cradle of artistic
goldsmithery.  And the three great official bodies of the State, the
Delegates from all the constituted Authorities paid homage.  And they
enrolled him in the First Regiment of Grenadiers of the Imperial
Guard on the day of his birth, and pinned the Grand Cross of the
Legion of Honor on his bib when he was forty-eight hours old.

To gratify the paternal ambition of a father who had dreaded the
stigma of childlessness, this graft of his race was to be forced into
precocious maturity.  You might have seen the little creature at six
months of age strapped in a cane chair-saddle upon the back of a
Shetland pony.  At five he could ride a military charger.  Dressed in
the white-faced blue uniform of the First Grenadiers of the Guard,
his tiny face hidden in a huge fur shako with a white plume and
_galons_ and a huge brass-eagled fore-plate, you saw him with the
Emperor at Imperial Reviews.

It is uncertain whether he was ever soothed to sleep with the French
equivalent of the rhyme of Baby Bunting, whether he ever learned of
the Archer who shot at a frog, or was thrilled by the adventures of
Jack the Giant Killer.  We know that the Napoleonic tradition was his
ABC, the Third Empire his primer.  At the time of the war with Italy,
he being then some three years of age, his utterances on the subject
were quoted in the daily papers as miracles of wisdom--marvels of
acumen.  His seventh birthday had been celebrated by the production
of a Military Spectacle, in the course of which real cannon were
fired and real military evolutions performed upon the stage.  His
great-uncle on a white horse, in the little cocked hat and gray
capote of History, was the hero, you may be sure; and three hundred
soldiers' sons of his own age filled the dress circle, stalls and
upper tiers.  One likes the pretty story of the fair-haired child
going down among these little comrades to distribute smiles and
bonbons.  One can understand the father's pride in the laborious
pot-hooks and hangers that compliment him upon the taking of
Mexico--word of ill omen in Imperialist ears!--and the scrawled
postscript that tells how his horse kicked at exercise that morning,
but that he sat tight and did not fall.  It was not for a long, long
time to dawn upon the expanding mind behind the beautiful, bright
blue eyes, that the Throne Imperial of France was a saddle insecurely
girthed upon a kicking charger, and that the paternal horsemanship
had been, and frequently was severely taxed in the effort to stick on.

You may imagine the query, Why?--forming in the mind of seven years.
Perhaps you see him in his lace-collared, belted blouse and wide
Breton breeches of black velvet, scarlet silk stockings and buckled
shoes, curled up upon the blue-and-golden cushion of the gilded chair
of State upon the three-step daïs in the Throne Boom of the
Tuileries, where, while their Imperial Majesties dined, he loved to
play hide-and-seek with his tutor and an _aide-de-camp_ or so; and
wearied with play, conceive him dreaming under the gorgeous crimson
velvet canopy powdered with golden N's and symbolical bees, edged
with laurel leaves of beaten gold, and surmounted by a great golden
eagle, perched with outstretched wings upon a laurel Crown.

Under the brooding wings of the Eagle on the Crown this child of the
Empire wondered about many things....  Did any discovery connected
with the peculiar duties devolving upon the Cent Gardes and the
Tuileries Police ever make the bright young head toss restlessly on
its pillow of down?  For he must one day have learned that noiseless
footsteps patroled the corridors, that observant eyes twinkled at
every keyhole--that sharp ears were listening at every chink for
suspicious sounds not only by night, for the terror that walketh in
the noonday is the peculiar bugbear of Emperors and Kings and
Presidents.

One may be very sure that long ere another seven years had browned
the fair hair, he was familiar with the fact that the guardian angels
of M. Hyrvoix and M. Legrange kept unsleeping watch over the personal
safety of his father, his mother, and himself.  That officials,
functionaries, ladies of the Court, and lackeys, male and female,
were maintained under constant and vigilant surveillance.  That there
were even Police to watch the Police who kept the Police under
observation.  That precautions of a peculiarly special and delicate
nature were observed with regard to the food prepared in the Imperial
Kitchens and the wine that came from the Imperial Cellars, lest
deadly poison should be mingled therein by those who did not love the
name of Bonaparte.

He learned, next,--perhaps the knowledge floated in the air he
breathed like some strange pollen, or was realized from certain
experiences garnered during Imperial Progresses, Distributions of
Awards, Opening Ceremonies, and other public Functions,--that there
were many of these naughty people, who, while the soldiers and
certain of the townsfolk in the streets cried "_Vive l'Empereur!_"
"_Vive l'Impératrice!_" and "_Vive le Prince Impérial!_" remained
silent even though they uncovered, and a vast number who not only did
not cheer, but kept their hats on, and sometimes hissed.  Following,
came the shocking discovery that there existed a party of extremists
who were not content with being rude and making ugly noises, but had
even tried--and tried more than once--to kill the Emperor....

"_To kill papa, who is so good to me! ..._"


In a glass case in the Empress's cabinet were preserved the crush-hat
and the cloak worn by the Emperor on the night of Orsini's attempt
outside the Opera, and damaged by a splinter from one of the
exploding bombs.  Perhaps that glass case now yielded up its sinister
secret to the curious questionings of a child.

The discovery that this father, so indulgent, so tender, and so much
beloved, should be the object of such destroying hate as was
cherished by these nameless men was terrible.  You may go farther
into the thing, and suppose its breaking in upon him presently that
many thousands of his father's subjects, not criminals or murderers,
but rather estimable persons than otherwise, thrilled with something
else than tenderness at the mention of the paternal name, and that
the Empire, which had hitherto signified for him the adamantine hub
on which rests the pivot of this spinning world of ours--was not as
solidly founded as his pedagogues had taught him.  That the Army, the
Peasantry, certain of the Nobility--not of the Ancient Régime--and a
section of the Bourgeoisie supported it; but that by the educated
middle-class, and by the intellectual, professional and
working-classes it was held in abomination--execrated and detested;
hated with a bitterness that intensified from day to day.

The cat came out of the bag a full-grown tiger.  Revelations,
discoveries, succeeded one another.  Disillusions came crowding thick
and fast.  When it was discovered that he was backward for his age,
and the question of a new private tutor was being discussed, he had
asked his Governor:

"Could I not go to a day-school like Corvisart and Fleury and the
Labédoyère boys?"

"Impossible, Monseigneur!" was the answer.

He urged:

"But, _mon cher Général_, you answer that to so many questions.
Pray, this time explain why?"

Horribly nonplussed, the military governor stammered:

"The heir to an Imperial Throne could not be sent twice daily to a
day-school.  Not to be dreamed of!  Such an innovation would be the
signal for fresh insults, provocation of new perils....  Never could
it be allowed!"

The boy's were rather dreamy eyes, under the silken plume of hair,
chestnut-brown like his beautiful mother's.  They were proud eyes,
too, when they had flashed at the word "insult."  And brave, for
mention of "perils" only made them smile.  He said thoughtfully that
morning, leaning his elbow on an unfinished Latin exercise that lay
on the table in the window of his study at the Château of St. Cloud:

"An 'innovation' means something that is new.  But Primoli and
Joachim Murat are being educated at a French College, and did not the
late King send his sons to be boarders at the Lycée Henri IV.?  Could
not I be a boarder at the Lycée Napoléon, or the Lycée Bonaparte, M.
le Général?"

With labored clearness and a great deal of circumlocution, M. le
Général explained:

"The heir of a Democratic Empire, Monseigneur, and the sons of a
bourgeois Royalty cannot be regarded upon the same level, or educated
upon identical principles.  But a plan has been devised for bringing
your Imperial Highness into actual touch with the life of a public
school...."

"How?  Tell me quickly, M. le Général!"

The child's delicate face flushed bright red.  His eyes shone.  He
sat upright in his chair as though a vivifying breath had passed
through him, waiting the reply.  It came....

"One of the Professors of the Elementary Class has been engaged to
take your Imperial Highness through the course prescribed for the
other pupils.  He will attend daily here, or at the Tuileries."

The child said, with a catching of the breath that was almost a sob,
and a look of bitter disappointment:

"The boys....  Then I shall not know the boys?"

"No, Monseigneur, except by hearsay.  The Professor will tell you
their names, ages, and--ah!--leading characteristics....  You will
learn with them, and every week you will write a composition with
them, recapitulating what you have learned.  And that they will hear
of you goes without saying.  Frequently, Monseigneur, but frequently!"

His pupil interrupted:

"They will hear of me, but what is that?  They will never see me--I
shall never see them!  Never join in their games--never be just
another boy with them!  Never be friends or foes with them--never
beat them or be----  No!  I should not like to be beaten at all!"

M. le Général rejoined solemnly:

"That degrading possibility, and graver dangers still, will be
averted by the fact that their Imperial schoolfellow will not
be--ah!--bodily present in their midst, my Prince.  Perhaps your
Imperial Highness would like to see the Professor now?"

And so the Professor came, and from him the boy eagerly gleaned
information about his little schoolfellows of the Seventh Form.  He
had friends of his own who came to him after High Mass on Sundays and
on all holidays.  But except Espinasse, they had been chosen for him.
The joy of selection and choice he was not to know.

Thus, many men of mark from different Lycées succeeded one another in
the work-room at the Château and successively occupied the arm-chair
at the end of the leather-covered table in one of the three windows
of his corner study on the third story of the Pavilion de Flore at
the Tuileries--and when he had been attentive and pleased his
Professor,--his reward would be to hear about the boys....  Some were
noble, splendid fellows, full of cleverness, energy and spirits;
others were funny by reason of sheer stupidity, or some quaint
characteristic or absurd failing which had gained them nicknames
among the rest.  A few were spoken of almost with reverence, as being
dowered with the magical gift of genius: poets, dramatists,
novelists, scientists in embryo, budding naval or military
commanders, explorers who were to plant the Flag of France in virgin
corners of the earth and proudly add them to the Empire that would
one day be his own....

He met his longed-for boys at last.  One likes to picture him--having
once taken a First Place in the Arithmetic Class--as being permitted
to join in the St. Charlemagne fête of the Lycée Bonaparte.  He sat
in the center of one of the long tables, with long vistas of boys,
boys, boys opening out before him whichever way he turned his head.
And he was happy, but for this thing; that though most of the boys in
whom he had been particularly interested were presented to him, he
did not find--as secretly he hoped to find--the friend of whom he
dreamed....

He tried to be _bon camarade_; to combine--and he had a special gift
in this--easy good-fellowship with graciousness.  But the boys did
not respond as he would have liked.  They stood to attention, and
looked him in the face, and answered, "Yes, Monseigneur!  No,
Monseigneur!" boldly, or they shuffled and blinked, and answered,
"No, Monseigneur!  Yes, Monseigneur!" mumblingly, and that was all.

He wished, secretly yet ardently, for brave, proud eyes to meet his
own, and strike out the sacred spark of chaste and mutual fire that
kindles the pure, undying flame of Friendship's altar.  He longed for
a grave, melodious voice to match the noble, youthful face and the
fine form of his chosen friend.  He sought a nature to lean upon,
which should be stronger, greater, than his own....  Superior
talents, greater capacities, ambitions to share, successes to
emulate.  And he found none.  Not a boy here was a patch upon the
shoe of gay, gallant, lovable, merry Espinasse, who had never come up
to his Prince's notion of a bosom-friend.  Could it be that the other
self did not exist anywhere?  We turned from that thought, we who
were lonely when we were young.  It made the world feel so big and
cold.


The Fête of St. Charlemagne having passed off without any untoward
incident or disagreeable demonstration, an unhappy inspiration on the
part of M. Victor Duruy prompted the suggestion that the Emperor's
heir should preside at the distribution of prizes for the Concours
Général, and thus be for the second time brought into sympathetic
touch with the intellectual youth of France.

You are to imagine the picture of the stately entry into the great
Hall upon the first-floor of the Sorbonne upon an evening in
mid-August; the reception by the Minister of Public Instruction,
gowned and capped and hooded, and the Representatives of the
Faculties; the ominously restricted and frigid applause of professors
and students, greeting references made in the Rector's Latin speech
to the presence of an Imperial Prince in the classic groves of
Akademos.

Hostility, hidden behind a mask of frigid indifference, was to dash
down the brittle sham, and show the fierce eyes of scorn and the
livid hue of hatred, and the writhed lips dumb with reproaches
unutterable.  Contempt and mockery were to be conveyed in the small
sibilant _s'ss_!  that rippled from parterre to gallery, and by the
intolerable jeering titter that replied.

Yet all might have passed off tolerably but for the beldam Fate, who
had arranged that the second prize for Greek translation, a trio of
calf-bound, gilt-backed volumes containing the Works of Thucydides,
had--together with a laurel crown--fallen to Louis-Eugène Cavaignac.

The young voice had not faltered in reading the name upon the
illuminated scroll.  What did its owner know of the Revolutionary
soldier, the dauntless foe of Abd-el-Kader?  The Governor-General of
Algeria who had been recalled to Paris to assume the functions of
Minister at War to the Republican Government of 1848.  The man who
had upheld the office of Dictator during the period of terror that
had followed the fatal days of June!  The candidate for the
Presidency of the Republic who had scorned to bribe; who had calmly
accepted his defeat, and taken his place in the National Assembly,
when Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the good citizen, was elected
to the arm-chair upon the tribune, and took the oath of fidelity to
the Republic of France.  Who had been imprisoned in the Fortress of
Ham, with other Representatives of the Left,--his gaoler a commandant
named Baudot, whom he himself had appointed in '48,--his guards the
40th Regiment of the Line, which had been subject to his orders so
short a time before.

Of his seven fellow-captives between those grim and oozing walls, one
was paralyzed upon release, others were victims to chronic
rheumatism.  Cavaignac had lived in retirement until the elections of
June, 1857, when he was chosen as one of the Deputies for the Seine,
in opposition to an Imperialist candidate.  A few weeks later he had
died suddenly, leaving a wife and a son three years old.


This son, who had half-risen from his place upon the bench at the
sound of the voice that called upon him in the name that had been his
father's, had all these memories in his flaming eyes.  He did not
seem to hear the applause that greeted his triumph; he gazed steadily
into the face of the young Bonaparte, and then looked toward his
mother.  And Madame Cavaignac, seated, beautiful and stern as a
matron of old Rome, relentless as Fate, in the front of the gallery
opposite, signed to him with an imperious gesture to sit down.  He
obeyed her.  And then round upon round of deafening plaudits made the
walls and rafters of the ancient building shake; and brought the gray
dust of six centuries drifting down upon the black or brown or golden
locks of the hopeful youth of France.

After that episode the heir of the Imperial dignities was not again
brought in contact with the students of the lyceums.  He made no
reference to the prize-winner who had refused the prize tendered by
the son of his dead father's relentless enemy.  But the insult had
gone to the quick.  Recalling it, he would clench his hands until the
nails dug deep into the delicate flesh, crying inwardly:

"Oh! to be a man full-grown, and avenge that day with blood!"

At other times he would weep passionately in secret over the memory
of the outrage; for, being of a sensitive, affectionate and generous
nature, it sorely hurt to find himself the object of such hatred from
one in whom,--it seemed to him, and perhaps indeed it was so!--he
might have found the bosom-friend and _alter ego_, so keenly longed
for and so eagerly sought.

The bright dark eyes and clear-cut features, the well-set head and
athletic form, the dignified, yet modest bearing of this boy, so
superior to himself in everything but wealth and station, fitted the
niche previously prepared.  And when he fell to dreaming, young
Cavaignac's resolute face and calm, contemptuous bearing were
invariably opposed to his own unslumbering resentment, and
finally-conquering generosity.  For, varied as the plot might be, the
_dénouement_ of each little drama would always be the same.

They would meet, in manhood, upon some field of bloody battle, during
the great war beginning with the French invasion of the Grand Duchy
of Luxembourg, ending with the conquest of Germany and the annexation
of the left bank of the Rhine.  A youth upon the verge of manhood,
the dreamer would have performed such prodigies of valor in command
of his regiment as to justify his appointment as Commander-in-Chief
of the Imperial Army of Invasion.  He had not decided what would
happen.  There would be a great charge of cavalry led against
overwhelming odds, under a deadly fire of infantry and artillery, by
himself.  He would cut down or shoot a gigantic Prussian trooper, who
had wounded a French officer.  He would lightly leap from his own
charger--the Arab "_Selim_" given him by Sultan Abdul Aziz--and aid
the prostrate man to rise and mount.  Their looks would meet, the
blue-gray and the fiery black eyes would strike out a spark of mutual
recognition.  Oh! the joy of heaping coals of fire upon that
beautiful, rebellious head!

Or Cavaignac would not then recognize his saviour, but long
afterward, the Prince having become Emperor, would head a conspiracy
to dethrone him.  Moving, as would be the wont of the Fourth
Napoleon, in disguise through the public places of his capital,
mingling with every rank and class, a mystery to men, an enigma to
women, worshiped by all, known by none; he would have discovered the
plot and laid a counter-plot, which, of course, would be successful.
The mine would explode harmlessly--the conspirators would be seized.
Their leader,--lying under sentence of death in a military
fortress--probably Mont Valérien--bedded upon damp straw, loaded with
massive fetters, would be visited by a young officer.  He would
recall the features of his deliverer of long ago, and fall upon his
neck, crying: "Alas! my noble friend, long sought, unfound till now,
thou comest late, but in time, for I am to die to-morrow!"  "Die!  Is
it possible!  Of what art thou guilty, then?"  Cavaignac would answer
coldly: "Of having conspired to dethrone the young Emperor!"  "Dost
thou indeed hate him so?"  "Ay! we have been enemies since boyhood's
days."  Choking with emotion, dissembled under a pale and resolute
exterior, the visitor would return: "And he hates thee not!  Were he
here he would say as much to thee!"  "Can it be possible?  How,
then----?"  "I swear it upon the soul of my father!  Thy Emperor is
thy truest friend!  Here is my sword.  Behold this undefended breast,
cage of a heart that has ever loved thee!  Thrust, I command thee, if
thou hast the power!"  "Sire, I am conquered; I have lived for a
Republic--I die the Emperor's most loyal subject!"  "To my arms,
then, Cavaignac!  Embrace me--thou art forgiven!"

Impossible, beautiful dreams, grandiose and absurd, ridiculous and
touching....

He was mentally carrying on one of these endless duologues as he rode
through the wintry avenues of the Bois, and dismounted at my Lord
Hertford's exquisite villa of Bagatelle, set in beautiful, secluded
grounds adjoining the park.

Born of a whim of the Comte d'Artois, gay Monsieur, brother of the
Sixteenth Louis, built in fifty-four days by the architect Bellanger,
at a cost of six hundred thousand livres, Bagatelle had always served
as a shelter for gallant adventures, not all of them set in what
Republicans scornfully termed "the night of monarchy."

Mademoiselle de Charolais, beautiful and haughty; Mademoiselle de
Beauharnais, handsome, sensual, and unscrupulous; Madame Tallien,
constant, noble, and courageous; the Duchesse de Berri, and how many
other women, famous or infamous, had trodden its velvet lawns and
swept over its floors of rare marquetry or its pavements of mosaic?
The blood of the Beauharnais mingled in this boy's own veins, with
the Corsican and Spanish tides and the dash of canny Scots derived
from distant Kirkpatricks.  That Celtic strain was responsible, it
may be, for his dreaminess and love of solitude.

He was dreaming as he rode through the forest; the spell of his dream
was still upon him as he turned his Arab in at the gilded gates of
Bagatelle, and dismounted before its portico, in the shadow of the
Gothic tower.

From childhood many of the happiest hours of this son of the Empire
had been spent at Bagatelle.  In its labyrinths of myrtle and
oleander, laurel and syringa, he had hidden, bursting with childish
laughter, when his playmates were seeking him; he had galloped his
Shetland pony and raced with his dogs over its green lawns.  Upon its
broad sheets of crystal water he had sailed his miniature
yacht-squadrons.  At his entreaty, the Emperor, always an indulgent
father, had endeavored to buy the place from its English owner.  In
vain! my lord of Hertford was not to be tempted by gold, possessing
so much of the stuff, or allured by rank, who was a premier English
Marquess, Knight of the Garter, and so forth.  Yet he was a generous
nobleman, and made the Imperial urchin free of his coveted fairyland
whenever he, the owner of the place, should be from home.

To-day's dream, for a wonder, was not the usual duologue between the
friend and the unfriend.  Albeit innocently, it was tinged by sex, it
assumed the shape of the triangle; and worked out, though, to the
satisfaction of the dreamer, the eternal Rule of Three.  Louis and
his dear enemy, men grown, madly loved one woman; a bewitching
creature, with a sparkling rose-flushed face, eyes like blue jewels
under a pile of black hair, crowned with a little cap of velvet and
gray fur, with a blue wing set at the side.  She adored the Prince
who had won her love in the disguise of a simple officer.  Fortified
by this passion, she could hear Cavaignac plead unmoved.  He, driven
to frenzy by jealousy, would conceal himself here, for the Imperial
lover would have settled Bagatelle with all its treasures upon his
lady-love!--and at midnight when a step echoed in the gallery of
arms, and the fair one, reclining upon this very fauteuil in the
window commanding the grass-plot centered by the Cellini
fountain,--sprang up with a cry of joy to welcome her lover,--the
rejected aspirant would leap from behind yonder trophy of
sixteenth-century pageant-shields, topped with the magnificent
embossed and damascened one bearing the monogram and insignia of
Diane de Poitiers; and, seizing yonder rapier from its stand, would
challenge his successful rival there and then, to a duel _à outrance_.

Need it be said that the Prince's well-known mastery of the sword
would enable him,--by a lightning _coup_, following a feint--to
disarm his antagonist; upon whom he would finally bestow not only the
lady, but the villa, with its treasures of paintings by ancient and
modern masters, its marvelous miniatures and enamels, its rooms of
porcelain, cabinets of priceless coins and gems, galleries of antique
sculpture, its costly furniture, its matchless grounds and gardens,
ending a great many nobly turned sentences with the dignified
peroration:

"Take her, Cavaignac, with all these riches!  I ask nothing in
return, but your esteem!"




XX

Could Juliette have known how she had been disposed of in a boy's
imagination, perhaps the Spanish Infanta would have replaced the rosy
nymph.  But while her Prince dreamed, her jingling vehicle had
crossed the Port de St. Cloud, and so by Ville d'Avray up the long
avenue between the breasting woods, stately and glorious still,
though stripped by the blasts of January, to the clean white town
that had sprung up, nearly three hundred years before (upon the site
of a little village patronized by wagoners), where an ancient feudal
castle stood on a plateau surrounded by lake, forest, and marsh.

A touch of a King's scepter changed this ancient castle to a Royal
Hunting-Lodge, a whim of his successor transformed the humbler
dwelling to a Palace.  Courtiers, officials, functionaries, guards,
valets, lackeys, pimps, cooks, barbers and innumerable hangers-on are
necessary to the upkeep of State; and these must be housed in stately
fashion.  Behold whole streets of buildings, with noble avenues,
radiating like the sticks of a fan from the sunlike center, uprising
like fungi from the swampy soil.  Behold, as the power and glory of
the monarch redoubled,--no less than thirty thousand workmen engaged
in enlarging and beautifying the residence of His Majesty, while a
regiment of Swiss Guards dig out the lake.  And when pneumonia,
fever, and ague carry off so many thousands of these hapless toilers
that the dead have to be carted away by night, and secretly dumped
into pits dug for the purpose, and the bottoms of the Royal coffers
are seen through a thinning layer of gold, and the Building Accounts
of the Crown Demesne show totals of unpaid debts sufficiently
colossal to stagger a lightning-calculator, and Ministers grow dizzy,
seeing a Kingdom on the brink of financial ruin, the sublime forehead
beneath the bediamonded hat and the towering wig is illuminated by an
inspiration.  "Ha!  We have it!  Quick! commence new works!  Pile on
the national taxes, press a million unpaid laborers into the Royal
service.  Let rivers of tears flow to swell the sources of our
dwindling fountains.  Upon the uncounted corpses of vulgar toilers
erect fresh monuments to all the glories of France!"

No ghastly visions disturbed the royal dreams, no awful Finger wrote
the dreadful sentence upon the marble friezes of his
banqueting-halls.  The shadow of the little cocked hat that was to
overtop his tallest wig by the whole height of a Crown Imperial was
never shown him in Witch Montespan's magic mirror.  The bees that
were to swarm over his lilies and drain their golden honey were not
to be hatched for many years yet.  He deemed himself immortal in
spite of the twinges of the gout, until it took him in the stomach
and carried him off, at seventy-seven, leaving France to shudder in
the embraces of a far worse man than himself.  Until, aphrodisiacs
and apoplexy having made an end of the infamous Regent, and Louis the
Well-Beloved having succumbed to vice and smallpox, and the Red Widow
having hugged the heads off Louis the Locksmith and his fair young
Queen, the Terror ushered in the Revolution, Era of Liberty,
Equality, and Universal Phlebotomy; until men, wearied of serving
many masters, looked about for one to lead them, and the Little
Corporal with the pale hatchet-face and the inscrutable gray-blue
eyes under the great marble forehead rose up and said, "Here am I!"

The Court of his nephew was just now at the Tuileries.  You saw the
town of Versailles in its winter slumber, undisturbed by the roll of
innumerable carriages, luggage _fourgons_, pastrycooks' and
tradesmen's vans, and other vehicles, over its historic and venerable
cobblestones....  Fashionable people lived there all the year round;
many of the crack regiments of the Imperial Guard were quartered in
the innumerable barracks; there was no lack of society--not the cream
of the cream, perhaps, but charming, lively and gay.

The 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard were garrisoned in
that antique quarter of barracks and churches, convents and Royal
harems, once known as the Parc aux Cerfs.  South of the great central
avenue leading from the Place d'Armes to Paris, you found its huge
monumental entrance on the right of the Rue de l'Orangerie, once the
Hotel of the Gardes du Corps du Roi.  It boasted a frontage at once
chaste and imposing.  The high window of the mess-room, balconied and
dominated by a lofty pediment, surmounted the great gates of
wrought-iron rolling back upon a wide sanded courtyard.  If I do not
err, the quarters of M. le Colonel were upon the second-floor upon
the left-hand side of the gate, immediately above a confectioner's,
whence rose delicious odors of baking pastry and simmering chocolate
to titillate the nostrils of Mademoiselle.  The sleeping-chamber and
boudoir, described in the Colonel's letter as hung with rosebud
chintz, and elegantly furnished; the little kitchen on the same
floor, full of pots and bright pans, scoured by the Colonel's
soldier-servant into dazzling brilliancy, more than fulfilled the
expectations provoked beforehand.  I rather think that the dinner--an
inexpensive and savory little meal, consisting of vegetable soup with
fillets of sole Normande, an infinitesimal steak _jardinière_, an
omelette _soufflée_, Brie cheese (nowhere upon earth does one get
such Brie as at Versailles), and dessert--had come from the
pastrycook's on the street-floor.  After the cooking one got at the
Convent and in default of the much better dinner Mademoiselle could
have evolved out of similar materials, it was a meal for demi-gods.
And you do not know Juliette if you imagine she did not dispose of
her share.

"I am _gourmande_, me," she would assure her confidantes in all
sincerity, fitting the tip of a slender finger into a dint that would
have needed slight persuasion to become a dimple.  "I love good
dishes, or how should I be able to cook them?  One of these days it
is possible that I may even grow fat.  Believe me, I am not joking.
Already I perceive the beginning of a double chin!"

M. le Colonel had excused himself from attendance at Mess that he
might dine with his daughter.  Both Monsieur and Mademoiselle were
prodigiously gay, you may conceive.  But even while Juliette laughed
and clapped her little hands in delight at the paternal witticisms,
while she leaned upon her Colonel's shoulder, or sat upon the arm of
his chair; while her slender arm twined round his neck, and her
cheek, no longer ivory-pale, but painted by the delicate brush of the
artist Joy with the loveliest rose-flush, was tickled by the waxed
end of his martial mustachio, the hateful shadow of the faceless
Charles rose up and thrust itself between.  It blotted out the last
rays of the red wintry sun, it sprawled across the shade of the
Argand lamp.  It was heavy though impalpable, and diffused a numbing
chill throughout the little apartment.

Perhaps the father felt it, for as they sat together talking by the
cheerful fire of crackling beech-billets that burned upon the open
hearth, he gradually fell silent.

You can see him in his undress uniform jacket of green cloth,
braided, frogged, and with fur edging, unhooked at the neck and
showing the white shirt, stiff linen collar, and scarlet tie.  His
polished boots and bright spurs, buttons, buckles, and so forth,
reflected the dancing firelight.  His forage-cap, a head-dress gaudy
and bizarre enough to have come out of a Christmas cracker, crowned a
porcelain bust of a young negress, chocolate-hued, with
purplish-crimson lips, pink protruding tongue, and rolling onyx eyes
(an art-object left behind as too fragile for transport by the
previous occupant of the quarters)--while his long saber leaned
against her wooden pedestal.

His handsome face was very grave, almost somber, as he pulled his
crisp imperial, and stared at the little dancing hearth-flames,
forgetful of the excellent cigar burning itself away to ash between
the first and second fingers of his well-kept right hand.  The other
hand sometimes rested on his knee, sometimes touched his daughter's
hair; for Juliette had slipped from her previous seat to the carpet,
where she sat leaning against him.

And all at once the chill barrier of reserve broke down.  It was when
a heavy tear splashed upon the hand that rested on the knee of the
crimson overall, a strong, brown, manly hand, rather hairy on the
back.  It clenched as though the single drop had been of molten
metal, and then Juliette caught it in both her own and spoke:

"Oh, my father, why must this marriage take place?  We have not said
one word, but I know well that what is in my mind is in yours also.
Feel!"--she drew the prisoned hand closely to her--"here lies your
letter over where my heart is beating so.  Much of it I comprehend,
but the rest is anguish--mystery!  War is threatened--that at least
is clear.  The regiment will sooner or later be ordered on active
service.  And--were your daughter the wife of a gentleman of her
father's profession, you fear that she might suffer as her
grandmother--as her own beloved dead mother did.  But though my
grandmother lost her husband, War spared her son.  You returned to
her and to my mother, not even wounded, darling!  And if you
apprehend for me a lot less fortunate, why need I marry any one?
Take me with you or leave me behind, I am your obedient daughter
always--always!  But I had rather you would take me, dear!"

Not trusting himself to speak, the father took the little head
between his palms and kissed the blue-veined temples and the clear
space between the wide-arched eyebrows.  The candid eyes met his,
that were cloudy and troubled.  He searched for phrases to disguise a
truth that must stab.

"If I met death upon the field, you by my side, you would be left
alone and unprotected.  Were I to leave you behind even, in the care
of Madame Tessier, you would none the less be alone.  There is safety
in permanent ties; but only when her husband is by her side does the
sacrament of marriage open a haven to a young girl where the
libertine and the seducer dare not enter.  I speak with
certainty--only when her husband is by her side!"

So women were not to be trusted! ... His palms might have been burned
had he not withdrawn them, so fiery the sudden blush that rose in the
clear, pale cheeks.

Barely comprehending his meaning, she faltered:

"Yet my grandmother----"

The Colonel broke in hastily:

"My mother was a Saint!  What I have said does not apply to her!"

"And my mother?"

Something like a groan broke from the man.  She felt him wince and
shudder as she leaned upon him, saw the strong square teeth of the
upper-jaw nip the ruddy lower lip, noted the ashen grayness that
replaced the ebbed color, and the points of moisture that broke out
upon his temples where his rich black hair was frosted with white.
And looking, she bleached and shuddered in sympathy.  His haunted
eyes and haggard face bent over an upturned white mask, that had
little of the grace of girlhood left in it.  The distended pupils
encroached upon the blue until her eyes seemed inky-black.  He would
have withdrawn the hand she held in both hers, but the soft little
fingers turned to living steel, and he could not free himself.  And
the blue-black eyes staring out of the pinched elfin face quested in
search of something that his own eyes strove to hide.  As though his
had been the weaker nature and hers the stronger (impossible, the
creature being feminine), he felt his loathed secret being
relentlessly drawn to light.  The clear, unshaken question:

"Was not my mother good?" compelled him to truthful utterance.  He
heard a voice unlike his own replying:

"At the beginning--yes!  I would stake my soul upon it.  But during
the war in the Crimea, when the Allies watered with the best blood of
France and England that fatal soil, her loyalty to the absent husband
weakened--her heart strayed!"  He struck himself upon the breast
passionately.  "Yet here beat a heart that would have throbbed for
love in death, had her lips kissed the shape of icy clay that housed
it.  It burns now with shame that I must strip off the veil of
secrecy that until this moment has hidden from thee thy mother's sin!"

The head bent, a swift kiss touched his hand.  Her mouth felt very
cold.  He went on, realizing that she demanded it:

"She fled with her lover upon the very day of the re-entry of the
Army into Paris.  After the triumph I hastened to Auteuil, where she
and her child were living with my mother.  That sainted soul met me
at the door--the first glimpse of her face told the terrible
intelligence.  Had other lips than those beloved ones stabbed me with
the truth, that night my revolver would have ended it!--I would not
have lived to endure the pity in the faces of the friends who loved
me--the curiosity in strangers' eyes."

A deep sigh stirred her, quickening in him the knowledge that since
she had kissed his hand she had listened without breathing.  She
murmured now:

"Poor, dearest, best father!  How old was I when she----"

He said tenderly:

"Let me see ... it was the August of 1856; thou hadst five years, and
thy curls were as soft and as yellow as chicken-down.  Thy mother
used to say, _Juliette will never be black like me!_"

That disloyal mother had been the darkest of brunettes,
ivory-skinned, and ebon-haired, with eyes of tawny wine-color, and
the tall, lithe, exuberant form of a goddess of Grecian myth.  To
question the man she had deserted with regard to his betrayer seemed
hideous, and yet...  Juliette strung herself to the effort, faltering:

"And for whom...? with whom...?  Do not tell me if it costs thee too
much!"

His comprehension was instant.  Very coldly the answer came:

"He was a personage of rank in his own country.  A military attaché
of the Prussian Embassy in Paris.  They had met at one of the
Imperial receptions at the Tuileries."

"_Is he alive?_"

The whispered words might have been shrieked in his ear, such a leap
of the heart and such a thrilling of the nerves responded.  He rose
to his feet and said sternly, not looking at his daughter, but
directly at the wall before him:

"The man is dead!  But he did not fall in a duel.  He lived to meet
his end during the Prusso-Austrian War.  He had left Paris _en route_
for Berlin when my representative called at the Prussian Embassy.
Strive as I would, I could gain no answer from him.  Nor might the
utmost influence I could command obtain a response to my _cartel_.
This being so, the disgrace is his--not mine!"

He grew quite tall in saying this, so dignified was the little tubby
man, so noble in his soldierly simplicity.  His daughter looked up at
him, wondering at him, loving him, sorrowing over him; yet yearning
to hear more of that beloved, faithless one who had dealt those
bleeding wounds he now bared in the sight of the child she had
deserted, and plowed such deep lines in his wrung and suffering face.
The words would break out, though she nipped her lips to stop them:

"And my mother ... did she repent and ask your pardon?  Did you not
forgive her before she died?"

"She did not die!"

The little Colonel had a great voice.  His "_Garde à vous!_" roared
down the files like a spherical mortar-shell, his "_Chargez!_" might
have set dead men and horses up and galloping.  Indeed, his nickname
among the troopers of his regiment was, I believe, nothing less than
"_Bouche à feu!_"  When he thundered the answer to Juliette's
question, not only did Mademoiselle Bayard leap to her feet,
vibrating in every fiber of her slender, rigid body, but the crystal
drops of the mantelshelf chandeliers left by the previous tenant
danced and tinkled, and the panes of the windows rattled in their
frames.  What more the Colonel might have said was drowned, as the
customary fanfare of trumpets sounded from the Mess, heralding the
loyal toast.  Then the "Vive l'Empereur!" rang out, and the
regimental band crashed into "_Partant Pour La Syrie_," and very soon
afterward, from the uncurtained window commanding the barrack-square,
lights could be seen moving across the shadowy space as the
dispersing officers returned to their quarters or went about their
duty, attended by orderlies carrying stable-lanterns of the smoky,
smelly, tallow-burning kind.  The Colonel's own duty called him
elsewhere, and he was glad of it.  He muttered an inaudible word, his
eyes averted from his daughter; took his cap, gloves, and
riding-whip, and strode jingling from the room.

Ah, it would need a great artist in words to depict the swift and
changing emotions that swelled and wrung the heart of the poor girl
he left behind him, and give some adequate idea of the storm that
swept over her in that lonely hour.  Joy at the discovery that the
adored mother of her childish memories yet lived was drowned in
anguish at the piercing thought, "_She lives, but not for me!_"
Shame burned her cheeks to crimson, grief washed them white again;
her heart bounded in her bosom, or sank, heavy as lead.  Except
Madame Suchard, the soldier's wife who had been engaged to wait upon
Mademoiselle de Bayard, and who now might be heard washing up the
dinner-plates and dishes in the little kitchen, there was no earthly
woman near to whom she might turn for comfort in this her hour of
need.

But as she wept, not the freely-flowing tears of girlhood, but with
the dry sobbings and painful convulsions that tortured women know,
there chimed from the great cathedral Church of St. Louis close by,
the first long triple of the Angelus, echoed by the thinner-sounding
bells from the Convent of the Augustinian Sisters, from the Priory of
the Bernardine Fathers, from the House of the Sœurs de
l'Esperance, from the House of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Mechanically Juliette's hand went to her bosom, her pale lips moved,
shaping the sacred words.  And then she went to her room and knelt at
the little straw-bottomed _prie-Dieu_ that stood before her Crucifix,
and prayed with passionate earnestness that He, Who when hanging upon
His Cross of Agony gave His Mother to be our Mother, would hear Her
pure prayer of intercession for that mother who had deserted her
child.  Wherever she might be, however low she might have fallen,
whatever the sins, vices, follies that yet environed her, held her
back or dragged her down, the ray of Divine Grace had power to reach
her, raise her up, and lead her back by the path of Penance into the
Way of Peace.

And pending the miracle, toward which end Masses should be offered
and Communions given; obedience to that father so cruelly betrayed,
so bitterly wronged, must, more than ever, be the watchword of
Juliette.  For the conviction began to dawn in her that belief in the
innate purity and truth of her sex having been destroyed in him by
the unfaith of that most beloved, most unhappy one; he sought to
safeguard her daughter's virtue by means of a husband, who, being the
only son of a widow, and therefore exempt from the obligations of
military service, must always be on the spot.  Sorrowfully she sought
her bed, to remember, the moment her head touched the pillow, that
although she had mustered courage to plead against the Colonel's
sentence of marriage, provoking him thereby to reveal the long-hidden
secret of his betrayal, she had never mentioned Charles except by
inference.

What was he like, this young man, pious, virtuous, devoted to his
mother, energetic, frugal, a manufacturer of, and merchant in, the
commodity of woolen cloth?  Could one build a husband out of such
materials?  Was it possible?

She tried once more.  The effort led to tossing and turning.
Conscience is most active in the night-watches.  Juliette's
bosom-monitor reproached her with having boasted to dear Monica's
untidy brother of the faceless Charles's mastery of the art of fence.
Other lapses from the strict line of veracity had preceded and
followed.  She had told one curious girl that Charles owned the form
of an athlete, and hair of ruddy chestnut; another had reaped the
information that he possessed a profile resembling that of Edgar
Ravenswood, with dark, melancholy eyes, and a jet-black mustache of
the kind that is silky and sweeps.  Yet another eager inquirer had
elicited the information that Charles was quite a duodecimo edition
of a lover, slender, brilliantly fair, and not much taller than the
bride-elect.  Should it occur to these girls to compare notes in some
hour of recess or exercise, what would be the impression conveyed to
the Great Class?

One had left School, however, and one was glad of it.  To go back
with that tragic secret locked in one's bosom, and mingle with
fortunate girls whose mothers were good women, happily alive or
safely in Paradise, how could one have borne that?

A well-known footstep outside the door of her room, which opened from
the little salon, and a gentle rustling sent a shiver through her.
When the step moved away with its soldierly jingle of spurs
accompanying it, De Bayard's daughter sat up in bed and kissed both
hands to him, passionately; stretching out her arms with a wide
gesture as though something of the maternal mingled with her love for
him now....  When "Lights Out" sounded, and the gas was extinguished,
and no line of yellow showed under the door, and the footsteps
retreated and his door shut upon them, Juliette crept out of bed,
lighted the candle, and picked up the scrap of paper that had been
pushed across her threshold by the strong, beloved hand.

It proved to be a note dated that day, and addressed from the
Tessier's house in the Rue de Provence, in Madame's angular, spidery
caligraphy.  Felicitations to her dear friend on the safe return of
his cherished one were followed by regrets.  "My Charles, alas! will
be detained in Belgium at least until the Mardigras.  The meeting of
these dear young people must necessarily be deferred until that date.
But to-morrow being the Feast of Saint Polycarpe, possibly M. le
Colonel would bring Mademoiselle to visit a friend, old and most
affectionate, punctually at the hour of one _midi_?"  With tender
remembrances the note concluded.  Beneath the
signature--Marie-Anastasie Tessier--M. le Colonel had scrawled in
pencil the curt intimation: "Arranged.--H.A.A. de B."

Knowing Charles safely bestowed in Belgium, Juliette sank back upon
her pillow, and soon was calmly sleeping between her two great
hair-plaits.  But slippered footsteps patroled the Colonel's room
until gray dawn showed between the slits of the window-shutters, and
the heavy sighs and muttered words that broke from him would have
wrung his daughter's faithful heart.  Sleepless and haggard, the
first pale beams of January daylight found him still pacing his
brown-striped drugget, a letter--the cause of his own and another's
misery,--crushed in his strong right hand:


  "555, AVENUE DE L'ALMA, PARIS,
      "_December_ 18, 1869.

"MONSIEUR,

"Acting upon instructions received from the senior partner of the
Berlin branch of our firm, we beg to acknowledge your reply to his
communication of the 7th instant, and must point out to you that the
attitude you assume with regard to our client is equally unjust and
indefensible.  No legal remedy was sought by you for the injuries you
allege that you sustained through the infidelity of the lady who
until the autumn of 1856 occupied--and without reproach--the position
of your wife.

"Further, during the years of her absence from your side, she has
neither asked nor received from you any monetary payments toward her
support and maintenance, facts which certainly appear to suggest
consent and knowledge upon your part.  You may further be aware that
His deceased Excellency, Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden, late
junior military _attaché_ to the Prussian General Staff, fully atoned
for an indiscretion of his earlier years, by making an ample
settlement upon Madame de Bayard; and that she is now in a position
to render liberal assistance to relatives whom Fortune has not
dowered with ample means.

"Under the circumstances, we have advised our client, whose natural
affection for her daughter strongly urges her to assert her maternal
rights to the society of Mademoiselle de Bayard, to enforce her claim
by the reëstablishment of personal influence.

"The young lady in question is still unmarried, under age, and
therefore subject to maternal authority; and our client does not
disguise her hope that, by awakening the long silent chords of filial
tenderness, she may gain a powerful advocate upon the side of
reconciliation, reunion, and that unblemished and peaceful happiness
which is only to be found by the domestic fireside.

"Recollect, Monsieur, that no legal bar exists to this most virtuous
and irreproachable aspiration.  And understand that unless a
favorable answer is shortly received by our firm to the application
now made by us to you on behalf of our client, her next appeal will
be made to your daughter and hers.

  "We remain, etc.,
      "WIEGELT, NADIER AND BIDUQUET,
          "_Solicitors_."


By the chill light of the new day the Colonel for the twentieth time
re-read the letter, and its cunning mixture of truth and falsehood,
the venomed hint at knowledge and complicity, struck fangs once more
into his quivering heart.

A devout Catholic, he had never sought to divorce the wife who had
betrayed him.  Thus a civil marriage with her paramour had been
rendered impossible to Adelaide, even had the Count desired it.  Now,
furnished with ample means by the generosity of her dead lover, did
the false wife seek at the hands of the injured husband
rehabilitation, in return for a heap of tainted gold?

Horrible thought!  The walls of the room seemed to close upon De
Bayard suffocatingly.  He opened the window and leaned out, drawing
in deep drafts of the frosty morning air.  It cleared his brain; he
realized, in the event of his contemptuous rejection of the hideous
bargain, a menace to his daughter's peace of mind.

Motherhood is of all earthly relationships the most sacred.  Yet
there are mothers who in revenge for disappointed hopes and thwarted
ambitions have not hesitated to strike, through their own offspring,
at husbands abhorred.  More than ever the husband of Adelaide bent to
his determination of placing Juliette, at the earliest moment, safe
out of reach of that spotted maternal embrace.




XXI

Upon the following afternoon the Colonel duly escorted Mademoiselle
to the dwelling of Madame Tessier.  You may conceive that the portly
little warrior, when panoplied in the full-skirted, black frock-coat,
gray peg-top trousers, black cravat and vest, and curly-brimmed silk
chimney-pot of private life, looked a very gallant gentleman; and
that his daughter, attired in a new and charming costume of fine blue
cloth, trimmed with velvet and loops of black silk cord, and wearing
a sealskin coat and a minute bonnet, consisting of a knot or two of
blue velvet, a froth of lace, and half-a-dozen richly-tinted
oak-leaves on her coils of black hair, conveyed an effect of elegant
simplicity and youthful grace, such as only a well-bred French girl
knows how to combine perfectly.

During the walk, which absorbed the best part of a quarter of an
hour, Juliette occupied herself in the endeavor to glean a few meager
items of information with regard to her destined husband.  To her
timidly-cast bait the Colonel barely vouchsafed a rise.  One may
imagine a dialogue of timid interrogations and baffling replies,
running somewhat after this fashion:

"Dear father, upon reflection, I find myself unable to recall the
features of M. Charles Tessier with anything approaching clearness.
I pray you be kind enough to describe him to me?"

"My daughter, I myself experience--how shall I phrase it?--a
difficulty in verbally portraying the form and features of that
excellent young man.  But his mother carries his image in her heart,
and doubtless has it on her walls and in her albums.  Look in the one
before you search the others; it will be wise."

"Assuredly.  But, my father----"

"Chut!"  The Colonel twirled a waxed end of his magnificent mustache,
and resumed presently: "M. Charles Tessier is a gentleman of honor,
an excellent man of business, and a most desirable _parti_ for any
young girl of good family and limited fortune.  Could the most
exacting bride-elect demand more than this?  In addition, he has a
fine hand----"

"Indeed, dear father----"

A fine hand was something tangible.  The owner of the commended
extremity might in addition be possessor of a good figure, broad
shoulders, a handsome nose....  And yet hunchbacks occasionally have
neat hands, and the Colonel had only testified to one.  That idea
might be dismissed as fanciful.  Of course, Charles had the proper
complement of legs and arms.  Half-smiling at her own terrors,
Juliette murmured:

"Pray go on, dear father!  You said--a fine hand..."

"Hah--aha! yes.  A fine hand for a stroke at billiards.  In addition,
it cannot be denied that Charles has a magnificent head----"

"I am listening, dear father!..."

"A truly magnificent head for figures!  Book-keeping by double-entry
is infant's play to this admirable young man.  He must teach thee the
logarithms, my child, when thou art married....  Docile and
intelligent as thou art, thou wouldst quickly learn to be his
secretary and head-clerk.  It should be a true wife's ambition to
help her husband in business, and this is alone possible when his
avocations are of the strictly civil kind."

It was tragic.  In her dreams Juliette Bayard had aided to put on the
casque, and buckle the cuirass of a stately warrior.  Now she must
perforce mend the gray goose-quill of a knight of the counting-house.
You might have seen how her slender throat swelled against the
encircling band of velvet.  Tears sprang to her eyes.  To keep them
back she bit her lip, straightened her back, and shrugged,--one
barely perceptible shrug.  The Colonel said,--was his kind glance a
little troubled as it turned on her?--

"The letter of Madame Tessier has made it clear to thee, that
although thou wilt see thy future husband soon, the meeting will not
take place upon the present occasion.  Since October M. Charles
Tessier"--the Colonel twisted his mustache--"has been detained by
affairs at Mons-sur-Trouille in Belgium.  I understand that at this
country hamlet--near the town of Mons--is situated the manufactory of
his partner, M.--the name for the moment escapes me.  He is a wealthy
gentleman of excellent Flemish family.  The daughter, I remember, was
called Clémence or Clémentine."

The Colonel cleared his throat.  Juliette expressed a preference for
the name of Clémentine.  The Colonel begged her pardon.  After all,
it was Clémence.  That did not matter.  Mademoiselle liked the name
of Clémence nearly as well as Clémentine.  The Colonel tugged at the
other side of the fiercely-waxed mustache, and changed the subject.

"The pavement rings beneath the heel; I prophesy frost to-night.
Thou art cold, my child, I saw thee shiver.  Shall we walk more
quickly?  It will be better so."

She quickened her steps at the suggestion.  There had already been
frost, and the air was keen and sparkling as champagne.  The young
blood in her veins answered to the pleasant stimulus of exercise.
Her cheeks were rose-tinted porcelain, her eyes blue stars, despite
her wretchedness, by the time they reached Madame Tessier's door.

The house of the Widow Tessier was in the Rue de Provence, which runs
north from the Avenue de Saint Cloud, not far from above its junction
with the Carrefour de Montreuil, and ends at the corner of the
Boulevard de la Reine.

A quiet, retiring street, its houses separated by ample gardens,
hidden by high walls of brick faced with fine gray Caen stone,
generally festooned with pretty creepers and overtopped by stately
trees.  A noble pine shaded the green glass conservatory, large
enough to be termed a winter-garden, which projected on the south
side, from what was a solidly built villa plastered yellow, with a
raised ground-floor, second story and attic story with Mansard
windows; the short sloping roof, and these--indeed, the whole of the
attic story to the floor-line, where a fine-worked cornice of stone
ran round the building--being covered with grayish-blue slates.

You rang at a gate of open ironwork, white-painted, in which was a
smaller gate to admit pedestrians, and while you were waiting for
someone to answer the bell, you had leisure to admire the heavy
_porte cochère_ upon your left, of solid oak timbers, studded with
iron bolts, surmounted with a fine arch of stone, centered with a
blank lozenge; and the neat balcony railing topping the wall to your
right, in which was a modest little iron-studded door leading to the
kitchen and servants' offices, always secured by a huge lock, and
opened with much groaning of inward bolts.

You are to understand that the roof of the kitchen formed a leaden
terrace upon which the bay of the drawing-room and other ground-floor
windows opened; these, like the windows on the basement and upper
stories, being furnished with outside shutters, the slatted wooden
pattern with which Continental travelers are familiar, yellow-painted
to match the plaster of the walls.  The terrace could be gained by a
short flight of stone steps rising upon your right as you entered.
But upon a visit of ceremony you went on to the main entrance, which
was reached by a handsome ascent of five broad, shallow steps of the
Caen stone, continued along the north and east sides of the house, so
that from any of the ground-floor windows, which were all of antique
French door-pattern, you could descend into the garden at will.  The
hall-door commanded a view of the stables and the cottage attached to
them, whose tenant combined the office of coachman with the duties of
a gardener.  You could not call those buildings unpicturesque,
covered as they were with the now leafless branches of a great vine
and a magnificent wistaria.  Beyond there stretched a kitchen-garden,
with beds of flowers and vegetables, under glass and in the open; and
splendid espaliers, whence many a basket of luscious cherries, huge
blue plums, brown Bon Chrétien pears, and melting nectarines, were
gathered for the table in the season of such luscious fruits.  And
behind and to the north side of the villa was the pleasance, which
must have formed part of a nobleman's park at one time.  For winding
walks bordered with ground-ivy led you in and out and among clumps of
oak and chestnut, and stately limes and acacias stood upon the sunlit
spaces of its velvet-lawns; while near its bounds shrubberies and
thickets of Portugal laurel and lilac, bird-cherry and hawthorn,
syringa and arbutus harbored thrush and blackbird, and in spring
rejoiced the lover of beauty and perfume; and one great tulip tree
opened its crimson-purple chalices beneath the rains and suns of
early June.  From the eastern boundary-wall jutted a stone pipe,
ending in a mask, from the mouth of which fell a jet of clear water,
forming a tiny pond, and a brook that ran away between stones covered
with moss and overgrown with ferns and water-plants.  But just now
the pond was frozen, and a great icicle hung from the jaws of the
grinning Satyr, and the blackened leaves of the water-loving plants
and club-mosses were hidden under a thin covering of recently-fallen
snow.  What strange uses this place was to serve before the terrible
year of 1870 was ended!  How many letters signed "Charles" were to be
drawn by the tiny hand of P. C. Breagh's Infanta from that grinning
satyr-mouth.

Entering the house--for you are to see it plainly, serving as it did
for a theater upon whose table the life-blood of France was to flow;
and her body, beneath the steady, skillful hands of a man well fitted
to perform such operations, was fated to undergo a terrible
mutilation--entering the house by the double glass-doors, you found
yourself in a parqueted hall, furnished with Empire consoles and
large mirrors in frames of tarnished gilding.  The chief staircase,
covered with striped drugget in gray-and-red, you found immediately
upon your right.  Under this was the opening to a servants' stairway
leading down to the kitchen beneath the terrace.  Upon your left was
a small door masking another servants' stairway leading to the
attics; and beyond this two large folding-doors, covered with green
baize, led into a medium-sized but lofty apartment, used as the
dining-room, looking out on the garden, and hung with a crimson flock
paper patterned with gilt palm-leaves, against which hung some large
landscapes and antique hunting-scenes in oils.  There was a handsome
white marble fireplace, with a high mantel-slab supported by terminal
figures, one a nymph, wanton-lipped and languid-eyed, her full
voluptuous bosom partly veiled by a leopard skin, her disheveled hair
crowned with ivy, like that of her companion; a faun, and young,
judging by his budding horns.

A third pair of folding-doors facing the hall-entrance opened into
the drawing-room; a fourth to the right of these gave entrance to the
billiard-room, from which access might be gained by a low glass door
into the winter-garden, a high-domed glass house full of palms and
tree-ferns, boasting a little fountain, whose leaden dolphin,
balanced almost perpendicularly on his tail in the center of a
moss-stained basin, could spout high enough to wet the green roof
when any charitable hand might set him going.  A door at the farther
end of this winter-garden gave access to a small room lined with
books, classical works by standard French authors for the most part,
smelling moldy, and apt, when a curious hand strove to remove them
from their shelves, to stick to their neighbors on either side.  And
looking at the conservatory from outside, one perceived, running
along the entire length of the rounded glass roof, a wrought-iron
gangway, or double-sided balcony.  From which, according to the
testimony of Madame, the late M. Tessier, from whose dressing-room
this aerial promenade could be gained by a glass door had been,
accustomed to enjoy the prospect and breathe the air.




XXII

Madame, a discreet and sensible-looking person, with very little more
mustache than is becoming to a Frenchwoman of sixty, embraced
Juliette warmly on both cheeks, and graciously received the Colonel's
salute upon her mittened left hand.  The mittens were invariably
black in tribute to the memory of the late M. Tessier.  Madame's
half-mourning, gray poplin gown, trimmed with black gimp upon the
gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt and upon the waist and
shoulder-lappets, might have been the same she had always worn, in
Juliette's memory.  Her cap had lavender ribbons, her front was bay,
whereas it had been chestnut, and the net of black chenille-velvet,
in which she confined her back hair, plentiful in quantity and iron
gray like her mustache and eyebrows, had silver beads upon it here
and there.

Father and daughter were made welcome, were entertained with wine of
Madeira, raspberry-vinegar--for which sweet, subacid beverage,
diluted with water, young ladies were expected to express a
preference--macaroons, ratafias, and little pink ice-cakes.  The
Colonel, having accepted a glass of the good vintage and consumed a
biscuit, expressed a desire to walk round the garden; Madame, who had
suggested the excursion, and Juliette, who had gone goose-flesh all
over--were left to a _tête-à-tête_.

During the collation described above, Mademoiselle's blue eyes had
discreetly raked the walls of the dining-room in search of portraits.
Nothing rewarded her search but a highly varnished oil presentment of
a simpering young woman in the vast flowery bonnet, the bunches of
side-curls, and the high-waisted gown of 1830, in whom one must
perforce discover Madame in her twentieth year.  A case of three
miniatures hung beside the copper wood-tongs on the left of the
fireplace.  When Madame affectionately leaned to her young guest,
patted her hand, and bade her take her seat upon a green velvet
fauteuil between Madame's own high-backed arm-chair and the
carved-oak-framed, glass-covered embroidery picture of Dido on her
funeral pyre that served as fire-screen, Juliette, in the act of
transit, cast a rapid glance at this case.  In vain.  Only M.
Tessier, in a high satin stock, gray curls and strips of
side-whisker, Madame in a lace cap, fiddle-bodied brown silk gown,
berthe, and cameo brooch, and a chubby infant of indeterminate sex,
with sausage curls and tartan shoulder-knots, rewarded her anxious
scrutiny.  She could not restrain a sigh.

To be taken by the chin is not unpleasant to a young lady, under the
right conditions and given certain circumstances.  But when the
ringed and bony fingers enclosed in Madame's black mitten, turned the
small, pale oval to the light, a choking lump rose in Juliette's
throat, and the black lashes veiled the eyes her aged friend would
have peered in.  She felt given over to harpies, abandoned and alone.
Almost she could have rushed to one of the long French windows,
wrenched it open, and fled to the shelter of her father.  I wonder
whether the Colonel was as ill at ease as his daughter, as he paced
the winding paths under the leafless trees, between the beds of
snow-powdered ground ivy, already sprinkled with patches of aconite
in partially thawed places, shining yellow as little suns against
dark leaves and wet brown earth....

She could see him from the nearer of the three long windows opening
on the steps that led to the garden.  He walked among the trees
bare-headed, holding his high silk hat and gold-topped Indian cane
behind him, his handsome double chin bent upon his breast, his fine
face full of care.  Even his boldly-curled mustaches seemed to droop
under the weight of sorrows that were no longer hidden from his child.

At the bottom of his heart he distrusted her, she was almost certain.
And from the bottom of her own heart she forgave the cruel wrong.  He
had come to believe, since the great betrayal, that every woman save
the Mother of all mothers, and his own, had it in her to play the
traitress, given the opportunity.  Thus the opportunity was not to be
given to Juliette.

Madame was speaking.  She no longer held the little chin, though the
chill of her hard finger-tips still seemed to cling to it.  She
smiled benevolently, making curves of parenthesis in her
well-powdered cheeks, and sometimes punctuating her sentences by a
rather disconcerting click of teeth that were too startlingly white
and never seemed to fit properly.

"One understands, my cherished" (_click_), "that this visit is a
little _triste_ for thee....  One who should have been here to
welcome thee does not appear.  To repress the feelings is
_convenable_" (_click_) "in a young girl of good education, but
nevertheless one cannot hide the oppression of the heart.  Rest
assured, my little one, that my Charles--who is to be thy Charles so
soon"--Madame's playfulness, emphasized by the click described, was
more than a little grisly--"suffers as thou dost.  He is chagrined to
the very soul, believe me! that he cannot be with thee here to-day.
Detained in Belgium, at Mons-sur-Trouille (where he has a manufactory
for the production of woolen fabrics)--by important business in
connection with an immense order given by a Paris firm of" (_click_)
"drapers, thou canst picture him counting the hours that must elapse
before the happy moment of his return.  He is ardent, my
Charles--noble, sincere, religious, and candid.  I, his mother, say
to thee: Thou art happy" (_click_) "to have won the love of so
estimable a young man!"

And with this maternal peroration two gray poplin sleeves went out
and enfolded Mademoiselle de Bayard, and two rapid touches of Madame
Tessier's mustache visited first her left cheek and then her right
one.  Fluttering like a caught robin, Juliette faltered:

"You are so good, dear Madame, but when did I win it?"  She added,
released from the imprisoning sleeves, and with a bright red rose of
agitation blooming in the center of each pale cheek: "Alas!  I refer
to the love of M. Charles Tessier....  If I might know where he has
seen me? ... I cannot recollect his ever having been presented to me.
In my mind, Madame, your son has no form, no features....  It is
terrible, but there you have the fact!"

The truth was out at last.  Now that the room had left off whirling,
Madame's benevolent smile shone forth unchanged.  She clicked, and
returned with archness that was labored.

"My Juliette, I comprehend.  Thou wert just a little bewildered....
Thy father has not made it quite clear....  Ah, naughty M. le
Colonel, I shall scold him by-and-by!"

"Pray, no!"  Juliette's little hands went out entreatingly.  "Only
explain, dear, dearest Madame, for I am bewildered, as you say truly.
My father's command that I should leave school, provide myself with a
_trousseau_, and come here to be married--instantly--to M. Charles
Tessier!--was so brusque--so sudden--that I might be pardoned for
saying I have felt less like a young girl than a poor lamb, hurriedly
taken from the fold and driven to the butcher's yard."

"Poor little lamb!" drolled Madame, still portentously playful, and
displaying a gleaming double row of teeth between the parenthesis.
Juliette felt more than ever like the lamb of her analogy, as she
strove to read the meaning of the smile.  Madame continued: "Too much
boldness--an excessive display of _sangfroid_--my Charles has ever
disliked in women.  When I tell him how _gentille_ thou art, how
sensitive, and how _spirituelle_, he will say to me, 'My mother, thou
hast chosen well! and when he sees thee...'"

Something in the well-powdered elderly face of the speaker sent an
electrical shock of comprehension through Juliette's being, evoking
the cry:

"Sees me....  But then ... he has never seen me?"

It was necessary to hold on with one's own eyes to Madame's, they so
spun and whirled in their rather small, round orbits.  Then they
steadied, as though she had made her mind up.  She said, and though
the treacly suavity had gone out of her voice, Juliette liked it
better:

"No, my child--Charles has never seen thee.  This is a
betrothal--this will be a marriage exclusively arranged by the
parents of the young people concerned.  Thy father, the son of my
beloved friend Antoinette de Bayard, does not desire that the husband
of his Juliette should be a member of the military profession,--I am
averse to the idea of my son's bestowing his name upon the Protestant
daughter of a Flemish woolen-manufacturer--for that that was
originally my son's intention, I will not seek to deny.  Wounded in
my tenderest and most susceptible spot by the announcement of
Charles's infatuation, I might have estranged him for ever--even
hurried on the catastrophe I feared, had not the advice of my
director, Dom Clovis, of the Carmelite Fathers--fortified and
sustained me in the trying hour!  I wrote to my son.  I poured out my
maternal heart in pleadings the most earnest--the most tender.  I
recalled to him the dispositions of his late father's will.  Under
this document," Madame went on, drying a tear with a deep-hemmed
cambric handkerchief, "I possess the power at pleasure to divert from
Charles and his heirs a considerable portion of his sainted father's
funded property.  And that power," said Madame, drying another tear,
"I solemnly assured my child, would--in the event of his union with
Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt--unhesitatingly be used."

Words might have come from the pale parted lips before her.  Madame
tapped them to silence with a mittened finger and pursued her way.

"Charles is profoundly reasonable--a quality he inherits from both
parents.  He wrote to me a letter inexpressibly touching in its
expressions of filial trust and confidence, over which, I assure
thee, I have shed the most consoling tears."

Something had previously crackled in the pocket of Madame's black
silk apron, when she had smoothed it over her knees in seating
herself.  Now she drew it out, and Juliette saw a blue envelope
directed in a handwriting of the business-like, copper-plate
description.  The sheet of white paper the envelope contained had an
engraved picture-heading of a square building possessing many
windows--no doubt the Belgian cloth manufactory possessed in
partnership by MM. Basselôt and Tessier.  From the page, closely
covered all down one side with regular lines of mercantile
handwriting, Madame read:


"Sentiments of the most profound agitated me as I read thy letter.
These sentences penned by a mother's hand, have touched me to the
quick.  Thy arguments, so delicate, yet so powerful, have convinced
me of the impossibility of the union toward which--I will own!--my
wishes urged me.  I abandon the idea henceforth!  Since Mademoiselle
Clémence is not to be mine, choose then for me, best and noblest of
women.  Let her who taught my infant lips to murmur the beloved name
of mother select for me some virtuous young girl upon whom I may
confer the equally sacred title of Wife.

"THY CHARLES."


And there, with a flourish like a double lasso, M. Tessier's letter
ended, leaving Juliette swaying between the impulse to shriek with
laughter and the urgent desire to melt away in tears.

Madame came to her rescue by proposing a visit to the billiard-room,
built and appointed by the late M. Tessier to afford his son
wholesome recreation at home.  For otherwise, Madame explained, the
young man might have been allured by the amusements to be found in
the saloons of the Hôtel des Réservoirs and other brilliant and
fashionable lounges, full of dissipated civilians and officers of
every branch of the military and naval services.  Clubs Madame
regarded as gateways to eternal perdition.  She dried another tear as
she thanked Heaven that her beloved child did not belong to one.
When possible, she added, Charles avoided restaurants.  A congenital
delicacy of constitution rendered over-seasoned dishes little less
than poison to him; he habitually suffered from nettle-rash after the
consumption of shellfish.  Green salad was, upon this count,
pernicious to his well-being.  Nor should he ever be permitted to
sleep without a nightcap, having been subject to earache from his
youth.

The mental picture of Charles, suffering from an attack of
nettle-rash and crowned with his protective nightcap, sent the
listener's balance dipping toward hysteria.  They were in the
billiard-room, a pleasant, longish salle, with two high windows
opening on the frontward terrace.  The glass door stood open leading
into the winter-garden: from whence came a smell of hot-water pipes,
damp moss, and mold, with an added whiff of ferniness, and a
suggestion of the cockroaches and mice that pervaded the place.

And then: "Thou seest, my sweet Juliette"--pray imagine Madame,
indicating with a lifted mitten a gilt-framed square of canvas
hanging between the two French windows--"a speaking portrait, painted
but two years ago, of my--I should say, of our beloved Charles."

Obediently the eyes of Mademoiselle Bayard followed the direction of
the pointing finger.  The painter or the evil genius of Charles
Tessier had induced him to sit for his portrait in the habiliments of
the chase; thus in sporting checks of the chessboard pattern, with
the addition of yellow leather leggings, gun pads, and a game bag,
and holding between his knees a weapon which obviously embarrassed
him, he was presented for the first time to the gaze of his future
bride.  Those eyes of Juliette's fastened on the canvas a single
moment before their dusky lashes dropped.  But in that moment
Mademoiselle had classified Charles as belonging to the Order of
Invertebrates; comprehended his profound insignificance, and realized
that from the owner of a head so commonplace, eyes so round, and a
nose so blunt, a mouth so lax, and cheeks so pink and
chubby--possibly the artist had been liberal of carmine--nothing more
of originality, decision, manly force, or power of will might be
expected than is commonly demanded of the child's whirligig of stick
and cardboard, as seen gyrating madly or spinning feebly under the
impetus of its owner's breath.

It was impossible, Mademoiselle told herself, to detest a being so
utterly devoid of character--a human pad of blotting paper--as
uninteresting as a counting-house stool.  One could only pity him,
and hope for his mother's sake that sound business capacities were
concealed behind that characterless forehead, topped with brown hair
cut very short and standing upon end--and wonder at or congratulate
Mademoiselle Clémence.  Flamandes are generally big and muscular.
One could only hope that she had taken Charles by his sloping
shoulders and soundly shaken him when he had backed out of his
proposal of marriage.  Though possibly he had never spoken to the
girl at all.


M. le Colonel found his daughter silent during their walk back to the
Barracks.  After a questioning eyeshot or so at the dainty little
figure that moved so demurely beside him--abandoning the vain
endeavor to read her mood from the droop of the pure eyelids, the
chiseled lines of the exquisite profile--the father relapsed into his
own sad thoughts.  And then Juliette, stealing a glance at him,
realized, with a pang, that his once luxuriant black curls were
thinning in places, and already thickly sown with white hairs.  The
upright martial carriage was marred by a rounding of the
shoulders--the stoop of a man upon whose back sits perched Black
Care.  The seams of the immaculately brushed frock-coat of civil
ceremony were shiny in places--the rosette of red ribbon at the lapel
was frayed and faded--the tiny medal tarnished and dull.  Perhaps the
mood of the wearer, be it hopeful or despondent, can affect the
apparel, as the chameleon's wrinkled skin changes from the hue of
dead bark to the vivid green of young leaves when sunlight touches
it, and fades back to the neutral tint when the golden ray is
withdrawn.

Juliette would not have thanked me for that analogy of the
prehensile-tongued, long-tailed lizard.  Inconstancy as described by
the poets is typified by the chameleon, and her faith in the
sincerity and truth of her Colonel was founded upon the living rock.

We know that she had, or thought she had, discovered why he dared not
trust her to a husband whose career must lead him from her.  "My
blood," she had murmured to herself sorrowfully, "it must" (she meant
unfaith) "be in my blood!"  The reason for his desperate haste was
all beyond her.  It must be cruel, because it hurt him so.

That heart of hers was as great as she herself was tiny.  Titania at
need could love like a Titaness.  And the blood of Antigone runs in
the veins of living women even to this day, though the noble daughter
of Œdipus died a virgin unspotted.  When the fairy hand in the
perfectly fitting gray glove crept under the Colonel's elbow, it
gave, with the smile that accompanied it, a silent pledge of fidelity
to the death.  But oh, blind father, could you have seen her, in that
inmost chamber of the heart where the most innocent maiden shrines
the imaginary portrait of a lover--taking down the stately canvas
bearing the presentment of a soldier-hero unknown, and hanging up in
its place the picture of a mere Charles Tessier, your eyes, like
those of the protagonist of the Greek drama, would have wept tears of
blood.

That night a letter was penned to Monica in the small, delicately
pointed handwriting that seemed appropriate to Juliette.


"To you, dear friend, who have exacted of me the pledge that I will
write to you before all, a faithful description of the person of my
future husband, I hasten to fulfill the vow.  M. Charles Tessier has
a fine head and a fine hand, my father praises his capacity for
business and his skill at the billiard-table with equal fervor.  Of
his powers of conversation I have as yet not sufficient experience to
afford you an opinion.  In the presence of his mother he has been
silent and reserved.  His letters, however, are eloquently expressed
and forcible.  When I mention his letters, it should be explained
that affairs have entailed upon him the necessity of a journey to
Belgium, where he remains for the present, at the house of his
partner, M. Basselôt.  Thou wilt draw from this the correct
conclusion that I am not yet married.  Do not forget to pray for thy
faithful

"JULIETTE."

"See you well, I am happy--content--I dream not of impossibilities.
_J'ai pris mon parti_.  I am sensible, me!"


In answer to a second letter from Monica received upon the ending of
the month there came:


"Tell M. Breagh that I have received his message, so generously
worded.  Alas! the poor young girl had no intention of wounding a
heart at once so courageous and so proud.  His fellow-student is
unjust to himself.  Why term that 'brutality' which was merely honest
_brusquerie_?  Yet if he gave pain--and I do not deny it was so--he
may rest assured he has been forgiven.  Tell this to thy brother, from

"JULIETTE."


"M. Charles Tessier is still delayed by affairs in Belgium.  I visit
his mother nearly every day.  An excellent housekeeper and
cuisinière, she is charmed with my skill in cooking.  For her and for
my father, who dines with her frequently, I plan delightful little
menus.  They eat, and praise the dishes and cry--at least, Madame
cries: '_Ah, Heaven! if my Charles were only here!_'  In a letter
which this morning's post brought me from the person mentioned, he
dwells with that impassioned luxuriance of imagery, warmth of color
and fullness of expression not denied to his sex, upon our
approaching union.  One cannot deny that it is pleasant to be the
sole object in life of a young man so worthy and so amiable, and--ah,
my dearest! were the sacrifice of a personal wish demanded of me,
could I, _knowing what I_" (_scratched out_) "refuse to gratify the
cherished desire of my dear father's heart?  Each day that finds me
by his side closes in deeper respect and love more ardent.  Our Lord,
Whose will it was to leave me motherless, decreed that in him I
should find the tenderness of a father and that of a mother too.

"J. M. DE B."


For the delectation of those readers who are anxious to sample the
luxuriant imagery, glowing color and plenitude of expression ascribed
to the epistolary communication received by Mademoiselle de Bayard
from M. Charles Tessier I append the letter referred to as above:

  "BASSELÔT AND TESSIER,
  "WHOLESALE MERCHANTS.
  "WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.

  "MONS-SUR-TROOTLLE.
      "BELGIUM.
          "--th _January_, 1870.

"MADEMOISELLE,

"That I have been tardy in personally assuring you of my profound
regard and unfaltering devotion you will pardon, knowing me detained
in a foreign country in the interests of my business affairs.

"Assured that all that concerns my welfare will naturally possess for
you the deepest interest, I hasten to inform you that jointly with my
partner, M. Felix Basselôt, I have entered into a scheme to
facilitate the manufacture of our woolen cloths and other textile
fabrics by the purchase and installation of the most recently
invented machines.  Raw cloths are now subjected to perching,
knotting, milling, washing, hydro-extracting, gigging, cutting,
cropping, boiling, brushing and steaming processes of the latest
invention, and we claim that the output of our manufactory will
henceforth vie with the first qualities of goods advertised by the
leading firms of Belgium, England and France.

"My mother's letters palpitate with your praises.  What happiness,
Mademoiselle, awaits the man who shall be privileged to confer upon
such beauty, goodness, and amiability, the sacred name of wife.  You
will be interested to hear that for Saxonies, tweeds, merinos, and
cashmeres for ladies' drapery our house maintains its old reputation,
as well as for the heavier fabrics of masculine wear.

"Were I now at your side, how enchanting it would be to confide to
you that we have struck out a bold and original line in dress-stuffs,
dyed with the new agent called Aniline.  It is extracted from
coal-tar, and the magenta so much admired by our Parisian _mondaines_
is obtained from it, by treating the crude substances with the
chloride of tin.  From magenta we derive rosaniline, a dye as
delicate yet as passionate as a lover's fondest wishes.  In an
experiment recently made in my presence I beheld a pure young girl
immerse in a solution of this extraction containing a little ammonia,
a spotless lily, when instantly the virginal blossom's whiteness was
changed to the loveliest roseate hue.

"Thus, dear Mademoiselle, your soul, so chaste, so spotless, and so
innocent, being plunged in the consecrated vat of marriage, will
assume the glowing hue of Love.  Bleu de Lyons with Violet Imperial,
all the most fashionable shades of mauve and other colors can be
obtained by methods equally simple, and with the addition of aldehyde
and sulphuric acid, we secure a green of the most brilliant, and a
yellow that enchains the eye.  By a simple process these colors may
be fortified to stand the test of washing, as firmly and unchangeably
as the affection I am privileged to offer you; which is hallowed by
the blessing of the best of mothers, and of a father noble as your
own.

"Receive then, dear Mademoiselle, the tenderest assurances of
devotion,

  "From yours eternally,
      "CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."


Over this epistle, apparently begotten between a trade-circular and a
polite letter-writer, Juliette had wept helpless tears of mirth.
Reading it, one may conjure up a picture of the excellent Charles,
spurred by the maternal threat of partial disinheritance to a
desperate effort, bending over the paper in the throes of
composition, diluting the ink with the sweat of a non-intellectual
brow.

Also, one may suspect the anonymous heroine of the experiment with
the lily to have been none other than Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt,
but the suspicion has not, to the present date, been verified.




XXIII

In the July of that year, while the gilding was yet untarnished upon
France's brand-new Constitution--ratified by a _plebiscitum_ obtained
after the usual methods, and recording seven millions of pinchbeck
votes--while the Imperial Court of the Third Napoleon played at
Arcadian pastorals under the mistletoe-draped oaks and spreading
beeches of St. Cloud, the question of the Candidacy of Prince Leopold
of Hohenzollern for the vacant Throne of Spain appeared in the
firmament of European politics (even as the voice of Lord Granville
prophesied a lengthy period of unbroken fine weather)--and broke
about the ears of the Power most concerned like a stinging shower of
hail.

The Spanish crown upon the head of a Hohenzollern.  Rather a
Montpensier, intolerable as that would have been.  True, the Almanach
de Gotha had offered (to General Prim, President Zorilla, and the
Cortes, assembled in solemn session) only the unwelcome alternative
of the legal heir to the throne going begging; true, the Spanish
people were very well satisfied with the idea of being ruled by a
Catholic gentleman of Royal blood, suitable age, handsome person, and
military experience, married to a Portuguese princess, and possessing
two healthy sons.

But that a Prussian Prince, holding a commission in Prussia's Army,
should be set up like a signpost of warning on France's southern
frontier, as though to keep her in mind of what would happen in the
event of another war on the Rhine--was, from the Gallic point of
view, intolerable.  "The security and the dignity of the French
nation are endangered by this candidacy!" cried Jules Favre.
According to M. Thiers, "the nominacy was not only an affront to the
nation, but an enterprise adverse to its interests."  Gambetta cried
aloud that all Frenchmen must unite for a national war.  Marshal
Vaillant made a memorandum in his notebook.  "_This signifies war, or
something very like it!_"  And at the Council of Ministers hastily
summoned to St. Cloud on the morning of the sixth of July, the
Emperor passed to the Duke de Gramont, his Foreign Minister, a
penciled communication.  "_Notify Prince Gortchakoff at Petersburg
that if Prussia insists upon the accession of the Prince of
Hohenzollern to the throne of Spain, it will mean war!_"

What haste to clutch at the _casus belli_.  When the Ministers
quitted the Imperial Council, and the Corps Législatif opened its
session, long-continued applause greeted the declaration of Gramont
from the tribune that a certain unnamed Third Power, by placing one
of its Princes on the throne of Charles V., threatened to disturb the
equilibrium of Europe, to imperil the material interests and endanger
the honor of France.  "If it be impossible to prevent this," ran the
peroration, "strong in your support, Messieurs, we shall perform our
duty without hesitation or faltering!"  Here was an ultimatum that
sounded the very note of war.

Do you hear the echo of the thunderous acclamations that attended the
Foreign Minister to his seat, the clapping of hands, stamping of
feet, roaring of lungs that have been dust for more than forty years,
or are now on the point of dissolving into their native element?
Naturally because the Right were defiant, the Left called their
utterances bellicose.  Had the Right manifested a disposition to turn
the other cheek in Scriptural fashion, the Left would have
passionately taunted this band of politicians with cowardice, lack of
patriotism, indifference to the sacred cause of national
freedom,--would have accused them of being traitors to their country,
and Heaven knows what else.

The Press threw oil upon the roaring conflagration.  Were this
affront submitted to, cried the _Gaulois_, "there would not exist a
woman in the world who would accept a Frenchman's arm!"  The
_Correspondant_ was "relieved to find that Frenchmen once more have
become Frenchmen."  The _Moniteur Universel_ was charmed to discover
that the blame for this momentous conflict could never be attributed
to the French Government.  The _Figaro_ left off making a cockshy of
the Imperial dignity, to admit that for once the Emperor's official
mouthpiece had spoken the right word.  And the _Débats_ praised the
attitude taken by the Government.  "Silence at this juncture would,"
it cried, "have been pusillanimous.  Shall the nation be accused of
bowing its head for the second time, before the cannon of Sadowa?"

Lord Granville, replacing the recently deceased Clarendon at Great
Britain's Foreign Ministry, mentioned to the Spanish Ambassador to
England that the choice of Prince Leopold would create a sore.  He
wrote to Layard at Berlin that he considered France had been given
good cause of resentment.  Lyons, in the shoes of Lord Cowley, at the
English Embassy in Paris, wrote to his chief that the unhappy affair
had revived all the old animosity, though it seemed to him that
"neither the Emperor nor his Ministers really wish or expect war!"
The _Times_ of July 8th was severe on the policy of Prussia; the
_Standard_ for once expressed the same opinion as the _Times_.  The
_Daily Telegraph_ prophesied that the succession of the Prussian
Prince would mean France's present humiliation and future peril.  The
_Pall Mall Gazette_ poked mordant fun at the attitude of
unconsciousness assumed by King William, who, between sips of Ems
water, declared his ignorance of the whole affair.  The _Early Wire_,
backing and filling, kept an even keel for a day or two.  Then said
Mr. Knewbit confidentially to P. C. Breagh, one midsummer evening,
after the early supper:

"My opinion is we are a-going to give a leg-up to this 'ere
'O'enzollern business, our Chief being--when England, Home, and Duty
permit him to indulge the weakness--a red-'ot admirer of a Certain
Person at Berlin.  Who"--Mr. Knewbit's wink was infinitely
sagacious--"is said on the strict Q.T. to have put up Field-Marshal
Prim and the Government at Madrid to making the proposal to the young
gentleman.  For the sake of giving a jolt-up to the elderly swell at
the Tuileries.  We all have our ideal 'eroes," Mr. Knewbit added,
"and our Chief's partiality dates from his acting in an emergency as
Special War Correspondent for his own paper, durin' the
Prusso-Austrian War of 1866.  It was at the Battle of----that name
always beats me----"

"Königgratz, perhaps?" suggested Carolan.

"Königgratz--when this 'ere Bismarck spurs his big brown mare up to
Colonel von Somebody to ask him why, seeing the 'eavy losses
occurring in his neighborhood from Austrian Artillery--he didn't ride
forward with his Cuirassiers to find out where the shells came from?
Took our Chief's fancy uncommon, that did, as the iron sugar-plums
was dropping freely in the neighborhood, and when he had rode on,
swearing at the Colonel like anything you can imagine--the old man
picked up a cigar-stump he'd pitched away, and keeps it to this hour
in the pen-tray of the silver inkstand the Proprietors presented him
with when he came home."

Said P. C. Breagh reflectively:

"It's the rule, invariably.  Men love Bismarck or lampoon him--swear
by him--or swear at him.  He's the devil or a demigod--there's no
alternative!"

"Good!" said Mr. Knewbit, leaning back in his Windsor chair, and
rubbing the ear of the ginger Tom with the toe of one of his carpet
slippers.  "Tell us a bit more.  Anything you can lay hold of.  I
want to see him stand out a bit clearer in my mind."

"He gets his name from the Wendish--I've read in the _Kleine
Anekdotenbuch_," said P. C. Breagh, "that 'Bismarck' really means
'beware of the thorns.'  And there's a golden sprig of
blackberry-bramble among the family quarterings, so perhaps there's
something in it, after all.  An ancestor of his who lived in the
sixteenth century was a tailor--and a natural son of Duke Philip of
Hesse, by the way!  Duke Philip was a lineal descendant of St.
Elizabeth of Hungary--who in her turn was descended from the Emperor
Charlemagne----"

"Lor' bless my soul!" said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing his knees.

"And he--this man you want to know about!--was born the younger son
of a Pomeranian country squire, and entered the University of
Göttingen in 1831.  They say that he permitted study to interfere so
little with the more serious business of amusement that the name of
Mad Bismarck was given him then, and had stuck to him even when he
passed his examination as Referendar, and began to practice law in
the Municipal Court of Aix-la-Chapelle."

Mr. Knewbit, drinking in the information at every pore, nodded
"_More_"--and P. C. Breagh obliged him:

"He served his year as Volunteer at Potsdam in the _Jägers_ of the
Guard, and then went home to the paternal estate of Kneiphof, and
began sowing wild oats--acres and acres of them.  The officers of the
garrison were a hard-drinking set of fellows, and the county Junkers
scorned to be outdone by them--so they hunted and shot and danced and
made love to the local beauties--they dined and supped and gambled
and fought duels.  In fact, they did all the things men usually do
when they mean to have a high old time and don't care a damn for the
consequences," said P. C. Breagh, "and when you regularly hail
smiling morn with cold punch, beer, and corn-brandy, and wind up the
night with quart-beakers of champagne and porter, the consequences
must be----"

"A taut skin and a fiery eye next morning," interpolated Mr. Knewbit,
"and a tongue like a foul oven-plate or a burned kettle-bottom.
But--my stars!--what a constitution that man must have to be as hale
and as hearty, and as upright as they say he is, at fifty-five, and
with a family of grown-up sons!  One wonders how his sweetheart ever
had the courage to marry such a--such a Ring-tailed Roarer....  But
Love's a thing you can't account for nohow."

"I have heard that the Fräulein Puttkammer's family objected to the
engagement," said P. C. Breagh, "but he seems to have got over their
prejudices in a way peculiarly his own.  By betrothing himself
privately to the Fräulein first, and then calling openly to inquire
how the family felt about it," he added, in response to the
interrogative hoist of Mr. Knewbit's eyebrows, "and taking the
precaution, upon entering the room--to hug the young lady before all
her friends."

"The hugging would settle the thing--in Germany?" asked Mr. Knewbit.

"To a dead certainty."

"Without any male cousin or anything of that kind getting up and
calling the hugger out?" asked Mr. Knewbit dubiously.

"When a man is six feet two inches in height, is as strong as a bull,
and possesses a well-earned reputation as a fencer and pistol-shot,
even male cousins," returned P. C. Breagh, "are content to sit still
and let him hug."

"And then he married her and went into politics--and to-day, when the
Press says 'Prussia,' it means him!" cried Mr. Knewbit.  "What our
Chief likes, and what fetches me!--is his cool owdaciousness.  If
ever I chance to find myself in Berlin," he added, "before visiting
any State Collection of Art Objects ever brought together--I'd choose
to 'ave a look at that man!"

Said P. C. Breagh:

"I've seen the Iron Chancellor just once--in '67--passing through
Schwärz-Brettingen on his way to Berlin.  It was in my first semester
at the University, and just after the Constitution of the North
German Bund was put into force by Royal Patent.  The Social Democrats
had protested against the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from
the independent State of Luxembourg--wanted to rush Germany into war
over the business, and they, as well as the _Ultramontaine_, having
plenty of followers among the students--both parties formed up on the
platform of the railway-station, and gave the Count three groans."

"How did he take 'em--the groans, I mean?'

"Rather as if he liked them, now I come to think of it.  I can see
him now, in civil dress, black frock-coat, vest and trousers, with a
white choker something like a Lutheran clergyman's.  And he jammed
his great black felt hat down on his head and thrust his huge body
half out of the carriage window.  His eyes--fierce blue eyes heavily
pouched underneath, and blazing from under shaggy eyebrows--swept
over us as though we were a lot of squeaking mice--though he was
laughing in a good-tempered sort of way.  And he shouted something in
dialect--they said it was a common Pomeranian proverb, '_Let not live
men fight over a dead dog!_'"

"Meaning----?"

"Meaning, one would suppose, that the Luxembourg garrison was a right
which had been given up as unimportant, and therefore was of no more
value than a dead dog, set against the cost of a new war."

"I'm obliged for your information," said Mr. Knewbit, pushing back
his chair and getting up to reach his brass tobacco-box from the high
kitchen mantelshelf.  "In return I'll give you a bit o' news--which
may be of walley to you.  You have been talking A.1 journalism, young
man, as different from the stuff you commonly put on paper as gold is
from this metal"--he tapped the brass tobacco-box--"and--my advice
is--For the future, write only of what you know; have felt, and heard
and seen!"

He sucked despairingly at the wooden pipe he was filling and, finding
it foul, stuck the stem in the spout of the boiling kettle--a
practice abhorred of Miss Ling--and left it to be cleaned as he
continued:

"Big things are going on in the world at this moment--things worth
watching and waiting for.  Damme!--though I'm not a swearer as a
rule," said the little man, "if I don't wish I could change places
with something that has wings.  The great man we have been a-talking
of is at this minute at his country-seat in Pomerania--that's the
estate he bought with the grant--sixty thousand pounds English, it
came to--the German Parliament voted him after the Prussian-Austrian
War.  And the King of Prussia is at Ems, a-drinking the waters, and
the French Ambassador has been sent there by the Emperor Napoleon
III. to obtain a special audience, I'm told.  And if you or me could
swop jobs with a fly on the wall at one place or the other--being a
German insect it would be likely to understand their crack jaw
language--me or you would be able to supply a leaded half-column for
Special Issue that would fairly set the world afire.  See this!"

He took the short poker from the top of Miss Ling's kitchen-range,
and, pushing back his chair, rose and approached the wall, which was
destitute of pictures, and distempered in an economical brown color.

"Look here, I say!..." began P. C. Breagh.

"The breath of genius inflates me," said Mr. Knewbit, who had had
more than his allowance of beer at supper.  "The impulse to prophesy
stimulates me.  Look at this!"

He wielded the poker deftly as he spoke.  And on the brown distemper
appeared in huge white letters:

  WILL THERE BE WAR?
  YES!
  HOHENZOLLERN QUESTION NO DEAD DOG TO FRANCE!
  GAUL, AND TEUTON RIPE FOR CONFLICT.
  BISMARCK'S VIEWS!


"But, there, my inspiration gives out," said Mr. Knewbit, replacing
the poker on the range and shaking his head mournfully, "unless it
was possible to change with that fly on the wall--and take him at one
of his expansive, confidential moments--if he ever has any--neither
me nor any other man living will ever be able to give Bismarck's real
views upon this or any other subject dealing with Politics.  Who's
this?"

The hall-door had slammed a moment previously.  There had been a step
upon the oilcloth-covered basement staircase, and now it bore Miss
Ling's first-floor lodger, Herr von Rosius, the "quiet gentleman,"
who taught German to English students and English to Germans at the
Institute of Languages in Berners Street, W.--across the threshold of
her tidy kitchen, pipe in mouth and hat in hand.

"Meine Herren, I haf to beg your pardons!  I seek the Fräulein
Ling----" he was beginning, when suddenly the tall, broad-shouldered
figure in the ill-fitting checked tweed clothes was petrified into
rigidity.  The felt hat he had civilly removed dropped from his hand,
his jaws clenched on his inseparable meerschaum.  Bolt upright,
crimson to the hair, and staring through his steel-rimmed spectacles,
he stood confronting the huge white letters that disfigured Miss
Ling's brown distemper.

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter! was ist dies?_" Carolan heard him mutter in his
own tongue.  "_Es ist in jedermanns Mund!_"  Then he recovered
himself almost instantly, picked up his hat, and gave good-evening in
his stiff, yet civil, way.




XXIV

"Good evening!  Miss Ling is out, and won't be back for an hour,"
explained Mr. Knewbit, "but if there was anything you were wanting in
a hurry, I'll see that you get it, somehow."

"Thanks, thanks!" said Herr von Rosius pleasantly.  "So that I shall
have my bill within an hour I shall need nothing.  Pray inform the
Fräulein I haf just received a cable from my family in Germany.  They
tell me I am wanted at home."

"Sorry, sorry!" said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing manner.  "Sudden,
sudden!  Hope no bad news?"

Von Rosius's pale blue eyes might have been stones, they were so
hard, and had so little expression.  He removed and wiped his glasses
with his silk handkerchief, and said, carefully replacing them:

"_Nein, ganz und gar nicht_, but my mother is in need of me.  So I
have resigned my post at the Berners Street Institute of Languages,
and got my passport from our North German Consul in your city.  Be so
good to give my message to the Fräulein.  I go upstairs to pack my
trunks and bags!"

Von Rosius's long legs had carried him to the first-floor before Mr.
Knewbit had done rubbing his ear and thinking.  When his sitting-room
door had banged, and the kitchen gaselier ceased to vibrate at the
concussion, the little man said, looking at Carolan:

"You have an eye in your head, young chap, and have lived in that
gentleman's country, and speak his language.  And yet the setting of
his upper lip and the blank expression he throwed into his spectacles
when I put a plain question to him, have told me more about him than
you've learned.  I'll bet you a ginger-ale that Germany is his
mother, and he has been recalled to serve in the Reserve Force, I
forget what they call it just now."

"They call the Reserve the Reserve, but I expect you mean the
_Landwehr_," returned Carolan, wondering at the little man's
sharpness.

"That's it.  Listen to him singing," said Mr. Knewbit, as the
first-floor sitting-room door banged open again, heavy steps crossed
the landing, and the robust baritone of Herr von Rosius trolled forth
a fragment of song: "Now, if that might be anything in the 'Rule
Britannia' line, my ginger-ale's as good as won."

"It's the _Wacht am Rhein_," said P. C. Breagh, returning enlightened
from an excursion to the bottom of the kitchen staircase, "and I
believe you've hit the nail on the head."

"He served in '66 he told me," said Mr. Knewbit, indicating the
unseen Von Rosius with an upward jerk of his chin, "and now he's got
to go back and be a cog or a screw-nut somewhere in the big
war-machine you've told me of.  What did he call Service of the
Active kind?  'Camping under the helmet-spike.'  We shall miss him,
for a quieter and civiler lodger never wore out oilcloth.
Hark!--that was the hall-door.  Monsieur Meguet's back uncommon
early.  As a rule, after the Museum Print Room closes he goes to his
club in Leicester Square."

The French gentleman who lived on the second floor had ascended the
doorsteps simultaneously with Mr. Ticking.  Mounting to the hall on
his way upstairs, attended by the ginger Tom--no longer a kitten--P.
C. Breagh found them, surrounded by a blue haze of Sweet Caporal and
Navy Cut, finishing a political discussion on the mat, while Mr.
Mounteney, languidly leaning against the door-post of the
ground-floor front-parlor, listened with a detached and weary air.

"_C'est de bouc émissaire_--I tell you he is the scapegoat of a
diplomat's malice!" declared the French gentleman.  "Of himself he is
without designs--unambitious! a good child, nothing more!  Brave as
he is--has he not been trained from infancy to hardihood and acts of
daring?--has he not slept with but a blanket for covering, and eaten
the soldier's sausage of pea? ... Brave as he is, he dare not draw
upon his unhappy country the terrible--the devastating--the
exterminating wrath of France!"

The French gentleman whose profession was Prints had spoken
loudly,--possibly without the design of being heard upon the first
floor.

Now, as he paused to wipe his streaming brow with a brilliant green
silk handkerchief, a door upon the landing immediately above was
suddenly thrown open, and as a trunk was dragged across the landing,
a stave of the German equivalent to "Rule, Britannia," boomed forth
in Herr von Rosius's powerful baritone:

  "_While there's a drop of blood to run,
  While there's an arm to hold a gun--
  While there's a hand to wield a sword--
  Brum--brum brum brum----_"


The German words were lost in the racket accompanying the violent
ejection of heavy articles from the bedroom.  Comparative calm ensued
as M. Meguet continued:

"Disciplined, well drilled, energetic, and brave, the Army of France
is unmatched and invincible.  Our Emperor assures us upon the honor
of a Napoleon, that, equipped and ready to the last buckle--to the
final gaiter-button, it waits but the signal to roll on.  Its musket
is infinitely superior to the Prussian needle-gun, that feeble
invention of an ill-balanced mind!--its artillery is commanded by a
picked corps of officers--is enforced by that terrific weapon, the
_mitrailleuse_.  The Army of Prussia is a bundle of dry bones,
fastened together--not with living sinews--but with rusty wire.  The
Prussian Monarch is a tottering pantaloon of seventy-three, crowned
with dusty laurels; who submits to be the puppet of a demon in human
form!  The Genius of France is a divine and glorious being, whose
soul burns with the noble thirst for warlike achievements, whose
blood courses with the fire and heat of unimpaired youth...."

From upstairs came the big baritone, buzzing like a gigantic
bumble-bee:

  "_The oath is sworn--the hosts roll on,
  In heart and soul thy sons are one.
  Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine,
  We'll keep our watch upon the Rhine!_"


"I tell you!" cried M. Meguet passionately, and pitching his voice so
as to be heard, if possible, still more distinctly on the floor
above; "France will cross the Rhine!  Her hosts will inundate the
soil of Germany like a vast tidal wave, and in one moment
obliterate----"

Silence had prevailed above during the utterance of the
above-recorded sentences.  At the word "obliterate," a heavy canvas
holdall dropped over the balusters of the upper landing, missing the
speaker by a calculated inch; and as the ginger Tom, with an
astonished curse, disappeared in the direction of the kitchen:

"_Prut!_" said the voice of Von Rosius from above, "that was an
uncommonly near shave.  Pray pardon," he added, appearing on the
staircase, emitting volumes of smoke from his big meerschaum.  "I so
much regret the accident!"

He was attired in rough traveling-clothes, and wore an intensely
practical woolen cap with ear-flaps, though the July night was
oppressively hot.  And his spectacles were inscrutable as he gathered
up the boots, slippers, and clothes-brush that had escaped from the
holdall, leaned the bulky brown canvas mass against the
hall-wainscoting, and felt in the drawer of the rickety hatstand that
never had hats on it, for the cab-whistle that was wheezy from
overwork.

"It is nothing, Monsieur, you have not deranged me for an instant,"
returned M. Meguet, with ominously smiling bonhomie.  Then refixing
his late audience with his eye, he went on as though the interruption
had never happened:

--"and obliterate from the face of the earth the entire German
nation."

Von Rosius opened the hall-door, letting in the sultry smell of the
hot street.  He stood upon the threshold, and blew for a
four-wheeler, one tittering, mocking trill.  M. Meguet continued,
quavering, and clutching his brow in the character of the terrified
Hohenzollern, and imparting a tremor of agitation to his legs:

"Is it, then, to be wondered at," cries this unhappy Leopold, "that
the opinion of Queen Victoria and the observations of the Czar of
Russia have quickened scruples already existing in my breast?  Will
my royal relatives wonder that I say: _This shall not be_?  The brand
designed to set a world on fire has been quenched by my mother's
tears, and the entreaties of my wife and infants.  Let M. de Bismarck
mount the Spanish Throne, and adorn his crafty temples with this
crown of piercing bayonets.  I withdraw from this fatal candidacy,
though the whole world should say----"

M. Meguet shrugged his shoulders and struck the blow for which he had
been saving himself:

--"should say what the latest edition of that admirably-informed
journal, the _Evening Gazette_, quotes from this morning's edition of
_Le Gaulois_:

"'_La Prusse cane!_'"

Von Rosius was standing on the threshold of the open door as the
words hissed past him.  Distant wheels were rumbling up the dusty
cobblestones of Coram Street from, the cabstand at the corner of
Russell Square

"Now, what's the English of that?" asked Mr. Ticking, rashly.

"Possibly," remarked M. Meguet, with a sardonic smile at the tall
figure and broad shoulders that blocked the hall-doorway, "Herr von
Rosius might be able to inform you!"

Von Rosius signaled to the driver of the approaching cab before he
turned.  In his rough, loosely-fitting clothes, he bulked large and
menacing, though his spectacles were as inscrutable as ever, and
under his light mustache his excellent teeth showed quite smilingly.
He felt for money in his trousers-pocket as he answered composedly:

"With pleasure.  It is a slang expression used by the blackguards of
the lowest quarters of Paris.  '_Cane_' is to 'back out' or to 'climb
down,' as the Americans would say.  Excuse me!  I go to pay my bill."

He nodded slightly as he passed Ticking and Mounteney, and bestowed
the same civility on P. C. Breagh.  Then his heavy footsteps
thundered down the kitchen staircase, from whose hatchway he emerged
a few minutes later, accompanied by Mr. Knewbit, who had volunteered
to help with the luggage, and this being stacked on the cab, their
owner got into it, and Herr von Rosius, rigidly shaking hands with
his English fellow-lodgers, and exchanging a distant salute with M.
Meguet, got into the fusty vehicle and was driven away to the
triumphant strains of the Marseillaise, performed by his racial
antagonist on the piano appertaining to the first-floor sitting-room
he had a moment previously vacated.

"'Prussia climbs down,'" murmured Mr. Knewbit, standing before the
inscription on the kitchen distemper.  "With the 'and on her 'elm
that she 'as----" he went on shedding "h's," as was his way when
deeply meditative, "I should doubt the correctness of that report.
Still, I shall advise Maria to keep them first-floor apartments
vacant a day or two--in case Mr. von Rosius's mother doesn't want him
after all....  What does Solomon say?  '_Designs are strengthened by
counsels, and wars are to be managed by Governments._'"

The kettle was boiling madly, and a volume of steam was issuing from
the pipe-bowl.  Mr. Knewbit rescued the blackened briar-root,
mechanically filled it, and looked for a light.

There was a crumpled pale green paper lying near his boot upon the
worn linoleum.  He picked it up, and saw that it was a cablegram
issued by the North German Submarine Telegraph Company, addressed to
Von Rosius, and containing a message of four words:

"_Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan!  Hauptquartier, Berlin._"

"Now, which shall I do?" asked Mr. Knewbit, scanning the baffling
foreign words written in the familiar English characters.  Torn
between conscientious scruples and a characteristic thirst for
information, the little man was pitiable to see.  "Which shall I do?"
he repeated.  "Use this here for a pipe-light--or show it to my young
shaver upstairs?"

Deciding on the latter course, he climbed to the attic rented by the
young shaver, and knocked at the door.

"Come in! ... I'm not working to-night," said P. C. Breagh out of the
darkness.  Upon Mr. Knewbit's striking a match, the young man, who
was leaning back in his chair before the venerable davenport,
contemplating the dusk oblong of starry sky visible above the
chimney-pots of Bernard Street, shook himself free of thought as a
setter shakes off water, and got up.

"Feel out of sorts?" asked Mr. Knewbit, burning his fingers, and
striking another match as he bustled to the single bracket over the
narrow wooden mantelshelf and lighted the gas.  "Anything wrong?"

"I feel out of the swim," said P. C. Breagh, sitting down again
astride his chair, and cupping his square chin in a fist that had
ink-smears on it, as he stared at the wobbling blue flame that
presently spread itself into a yellow fan of radiance, "and hipped
and beastly.  I've no right to quarrel with my bread-and-butter, but
I'm doing it to-night.  The fact that I'm a Nobody doesn't prevent me
from wanting to wind up as Somebody.  Putting the case roughly,
that's what's wrong."

"This here house," said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing manner, "belonged
to a man who was a Nobody, if you like.  A Master Seaman, who used to
tramp it to his ship at Wapping, and pick up the outcast babies lying
in the kennels, and roll 'em in his big boat-cloak and carry 'em
home.  Them foundlings was nobodies--yet two of 'em lived to be Lord
Mayors of London.  Old Captain Coram, who founded the Hospital, died
neglected and forgotten, but nobody looking at his tomb in the Chapel
yonder will deny he wound up as Somebody at last!"

P. C. Breagh yawned hugely and rumpled his hair discontentedly.

"The chap you're talking of was a philanthropist, and I want--I'm not
ashamed to want--to build a career for myself instead of founding a
charity-school.  I want--your own talk has made me want!--to get out
of this little squirrel-cage--even though there are nuts and sugar
and bread in it all the year round.  And"--his scowl was
portentous--"if this Hohenzollern hadn't backed out of the Spanish
Crown affair, when France cockadoodled, and there had been a racket
on the Rhine frontier--I'd just have rummaged round to find an editor
who'd be ass enough to pay a raw hand for letters sent from the seat
of hostilities--and if I couldn't have found one--and of course I
couldn't--when seasoned men are as plentiful as nutshells in the
Adelphi gallery--I'd have gone to the war as a camp-follower--and got
experience that way!"

Said Mr. Knewbit, turning and scanning the resolute, dogged young
face, with black eyes that twinkled like jet beads:

"I don't agree with you that seasoned Correspondents are plentiful.
There are thousands who're ready to sit in an office behind the
Compositors' Room, and write eyewitnesses' accounts of thrilling
charges.  But them that are ready to go out with a Permit and get
attached to a Staff; them that are ready and willing to march with an
Army on the War path--starve when there are no rations, lie in the
fields in the sopping rain when no roof's to be had to cover
'em--write accounts of the day's fighting under shell-fire, and
cheerfully get killed if a bullet comes their way in the course o'
things!--you can't call the journalistic profession overstocked with
them.  If you do, just name me one such man for each finger of these
two big hands of mine.  I defy you to, so there!"

They were very big hands, and as Mr. Knewbit held them up side by
side, with the palms toward his young shaver, they not undistantly
resembled a pair of decent-sized flatfish.

"To become a man like one of these--and they're the Pick of the
British Nation," said Mr. Knewbit, "you must be pitched into the
midst of things neck and crop, and left to sink or swim.  I
compliment you when I say that I believe you one of the swimming
kind.  Now, supposing War broke out after all--how much Hard Cash
would you want to carry you through a Campaign?"

"I've got five pounds put away in the Post-Office Savings Bank,"
returned P. C. Breagh, after a moment's mental calculation, "and I
believe I could manage if I had another fifteen."

"Making Twenty Pound," said Mr. Knewbit, biting a finger
thoughtfully.  He threw the finger out at P. C. Breagh, and his black
eyes twinkled more than ever.  "For Fifteen Pound down would you
undertake to write and send home to the person advancing you the
money, for--say four weeks (that'd give two nations comfortable time
to have it out and settle their differences in a Christian-like
manner, with a little burning of powder, and bloodshed)--three
letters per week, describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary,
everyday people--what you've seen, and heard--and felt--and
smelt--don't forget that!" said Mr. Knewbit, shaking his finger
warningly at P. C. Breagh, "on the march, or in the bivouac, or while
the fighting was going on?"

P. C. Breagh would have broken in here, but the held-up finger
stopped him on the verge of utterance:

"Avoid sham Technicality," said Mr. Knewbit sternly.  "Don't let me
have stuff like: '_Sir--On the morning of the --th the Field-Marshal
von Blitherem--or General Parlezvous--shifted the left wing of his
Division nearer to his center, and shortly after nine o 'clock the
forces under command of What'shisname and Thingummy began to move in
column of so and so.  A light 'aze lay upon the fields--the droppin'
fire of the enemy's Artillery made itself felt at the Advance Posts
nor' and nor'-west._'  Nor don't you ladle me out sentimental
slumgullion, after the fashion of--'_All is Peace, while I pen these
'asty lines and sip my morning coffee.  Yet ere the radiant beams of
Sol will have dried the pearly dew from these smiling fields, the
'ideous roar of cannon and the withering burst of shrapnel will have
devastated and blighted Nature's choicest 'andiwork, and Man, that
noblest work of the Creative Power--will be engaged in the 'orrible
task of destroying fellow-men wrought in the image of hisself._'  For
the Lord is a Man of War--according to the Scriptures," said Mr.
Knewbit, ignoring P. C. Breagh's amusement.  "And it is written that
He shall overthrow Kingdoms and break the scepters of Kings, and
cause that nations shall be swallowed up in nations."  He added, with
a sharp change to his business tone, "And bad or good, these letters
of yours are mine, to burn or print as I think fit and necessary?
All right!  I'll draw up a little agreement--and whenever you choose
to sign it--there's your Fifteen Pounds.--Lord! to think I should
live to send out a Special Correspondent, all to my own cheek!
It's--a--a luxury I should never have anticipated."

"The Correspondent won't be much use without a war to correspond
about," said Carolan, growing weary of Mr. Knewbit's humor.  "And I
suppose there won't be one now."

"We shall know for certain, I dare say, when you've thrown your eye
over this paper here," said his patron, producing a crumpled oblong
of pale green.  "That it's addressed to another person ain't your
business.  I mean that person no injury--and naturally no more don't
you.  What you're asked to do is to English these words for me."  He
handed over the cablegram and expanded himself to hear.  P. C. Breagh
read with lifting eyebrows:

"_Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan!  Hauptquartier, Berlin._"

"And what's that mean?  English it, can't you?" snapped Mr. Knewbit,
rabid with curiosity.

P. C. Breagh Englished it as requested:

"Lance in rest, Hussar.  Headquarters, Berlin."


Said Mr. Knewbit later on, warming his calves despite the heat of the
weather, at the low coke fire in the kitchen register, while Miss
Ling bustled about clearing away the supper-cloth:

"That there cable was received in London at six-thirty this evening,
and the _Evening Gazette_ Meguet quoted from was the latest
issue--about eleven a.m.  I shall go down early to the office
to-night!"


His Excellency Field-Marshal General Count von Moltke had said that
day, having dropped in at the Berlin Headquarters of the Reserve
_Landwehr_ for the purpose of perusing certain lists sent from London
a few days previously by the Teutonic gentleman who taught English to
German immigrants at the Institute in Berners Street, W.:

"It was an excellent idea of Colonel von Rosius to fish for missing
Prussian conscripts and deserters from our _Landwehr_ in the
character of a teacher of English to foreigners in London.  He has
netted in a year, two thousand privates and non-commissioned
officers, would-be waiters, clerks, porters, valets, and
tradesmen--men of all ages, from forty to nineteen.  A useful
officer--a very intelligent officer.  We shall make up much leakage
in adopting his plan!"


In the dimly gaslit murkiness of three o'clock in the morning Mr.
Knewbit sallied forth to business, carrying his hat in his hand as he
went, for the weather was oppressive, yet walking at his usual
red-hot pace, and making as much noise with his boots as three
ordinary men.

"I'm not in my usual mood for Nature," he said, on reaching the
bottom of gray, grimy Endell Street, "and I flatter myself on being
tough enough--at a pinch--to do without my customary dose of fresh
air.  So I'll twist down Long Acre and take the Drury Lane short-cut.
Not that there is any special reason for hurry to-night."

Yet hurry seemed abroad to an observation as strictly professional as
Mr. Knewbit's.  Cabs rattled over the stones of the Strand, dashing
Fleet Streetward; panting messengers clutching envelopes dived under
the horses' noses; hurried pedestrians carrying little black bags
jostled Mr. Knewbit every moment; windows of offices glowed like
furnaces, and the champing of steam-engines made a continual beat
upon the ear.

"The last report from the late Debate in the Commons is in by now,"
said Mr. Knewbit, looking at his stout silver timekeeper, under a
gas-lamp, "and Gladstone 'as made short work of that last batch of
Bills for the Session.  Fee Fo Fum was nothing to 'im.  Merchant
Shipping, Ballot, Turnpikes, Inclosures--and a baker's dozen of
Scotch Bills 'ave been offered up in a regular 'ecatomb, and
anathemas 'ave been 'urled at the 'eads of the Opposition with the
usual inspiritin' effect.  The gentleman who is a-trying to put a
stop to the employment of young children in Factories and Workshops
'as been put down with the powerful argument that the kids like their
work, and would get up at four in the morning to do it for nothink if
they wasn't paid for it.  What a headin' I could make out of that!
The stoker who was drivin' the engine to give the reg'lar driver a
rest when the Carlisle Railway Disaster happened has been released
without a stain on 'is character, and complimented by the Committee
on his 'umanity into the bargain.  Mr. Bright is better, and will
wake up the Board of Trade presently.  That's all we shall have for
our bill of fare this issue, includin' the City Correspondence,
Sportin' Intelligence, Markets, Stocks, and state of the weather,
Railway Shares, Law and Police reports, and Births, Deaths, and
Marriages, and not leavin' out the new midsummer drama at Sadler's
Wells Theater or the letters written by gentlemen with grievances,
signing theirselves 'Pater-familias,' or 'Englishman,' or 'Verax,'
who have been sauced by hackney-cab drivers or over-rated by the
Income Tax, or overcharged for a cold-mutton, lettuce-salad and
cheese luncheon in a country inn.  That's all, and no more than bound
to be!  And yet I feel as if something was going to happen.  I'm not
due in my Department for another hour.  I shall do a bit of a Look
Round."

He entered by the swing-doors of the Fleet Street general entrance,
meeting a rush of hot air, powerfully flavored with gas and
machine-oil, and was instantly borne off his feet by an avalanche of
telegraph-agency messengers in oilskin caps and capes.  The place was
ablaze with gas, shirt-sleeved men and grubby boys ran hither and
thither like agitated insects.  The walls shook with the panting of
engines getting up steam.  Perspiring printer-foremen shot in and out
of little baking-hot glass offices where sub-editors were cutting
down heaps of "flimsy," ramming sheets of copy on files, correcting
proofs, and curtailing pars....

Said Mr. Knewbit, fanning himself on a landing after climbing a great
many iron-shod staircases, and passing in and out of a great many
swing-doors emitting puffs of the hot gas-and-oil-perfumed air
already mentioned, and leading to glass-roofed departments, where
shirt-sleeved and aproned men labored for dear life, and huge
steam-power machines at high pressure trembled and panted like
elephants gone mad:

"The Foreign Telegrams are in type and the Leaders are in the chases.
The forms are in the machines, and in another minute the word will be
given to Print.  Halloa!  Beg pardon, sir!  I'm sure I didn't see
you!"

For a little red-hot, perspiring gentleman had leaped up the
staircase like a goat of the mountain, had charged at the swing-doors
immediately behind Knewbit, collided with him, sworn at him
breathlessly--and vanished with a double thud of the swing-doors, and
a shout of "Matheson!"

A clang of voices seemed to answer him, there was a brief minute's
delay, ages as it seemed to the waiting Mr. Knewbit; then the mad
elephants, unchained, began to heave and stamp and snort.  And--at
the rate of twenty-five thousand an hour, began to roll, from the
great cylinders of damp paper, the day's issue of the _Early Wire_.

They rolled out--as similar cylinders were rolling up and down Fleet
Street and all the world over, the Report of the late Debate in the
Commons, the list of Bills beheaded by the Prime Minister, the
ineffectual efforts of the gentleman who was trying to stop the
Factory Owners from employing Infant Labor, the result of the
Commission of Inquiry upon the Carlisle Railway Disaster, and all the
News of the day.  And in a space reserved for the Latest Foreign
Intelligence appeared a telegram sent from Ems by the King of
Prussia, as condensed at a dinner-council of three convivials, in the
Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.

And all the world read it and commented, as British stocks went up
and Continental Stocks played seesaw:

"The King of Prussia refuses to receive the French Ambassador! ...
This most certainly means WAR!"




XXV

Perched on the wall,--hung with an old-world Chinese paper, figured
with sprays of bamboo, pagodas, bridges, mandarins promenading under
yellow umbrellas, and fair Celestials reclining on the banks of a
meandering, bright blue stream--the German fly of Mr. Knewbit's envy
would have reaped scant information from the conversation of the
three men sitting at the dinner-table, for the reason that they
conversed in English--perhaps for privacy's sake.

The apartment, not ordinarily used as a dining-room, possessed three
sets of folding-doors, and beyond a sofa and twelve heavy chairs,
upholstered with a Chinese brocade matching the paper, was scantily
furnished.  The table plate was solid and handsome.  A pair of huge
silver-gilt wine-coolers displayed a goodly array of champagne
bottles, a cellar-basket with rows of horizontal wicker-nests
contained claret, Burgundy, and Rhine wine.  The second course was
under discussion, but the servants, after placing the dishes on the
table, had withdrawn.  By a bell kept on a dumb-waiter at the host's
elbow, bearing sauces, clean plates, spare glasses, bread of white
and black, and other requisites, the attendants could be summoned at
need.

The hostess's chair at the table-head was vacant.  The two guests'
places were laid on the right and left hand of the host.  All three
men were in uniform, two were well stricken in years; and Time had
not left sufficient locks among them to furnish a wig-maker with
material for covering a bald patch.

Also, they were men of whom the world had heard much already, and
was, before the ending of the year, to hear a great deal more.

The tall, heavily-built man of sixty-seven, in the uniform of a
General of Division, who sat upon the host's right hand, boasting a
hair-tuft above either ear, a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and a
bristling mustache dyed to savage blackness, any intelligent Berliner
would have recognized as Von Roon, the Prussian Minister of War;
while the mild-looking veteran of seventy who opposed him, displaying
the crimson badge of the Great General Staff upon a plain dark
close-buttoned military frock, with the ribbons of a dozen
decorations showing in a narrow line on his left breast and the
coveted Cross of the Red Eagle of the First Class hanging at the
black regulation stock that clipped his unstarched linen collar,
would have been claimed by the veriest street urchin as "Our Moltke!"

You saw in this hale, lean, stooping Staff Officer, who covered a
scalp as bare as a new-born babe's with an obvious auburn wig, the
first soldier of the day, the past-master in war-craft.  His fine,
transparent beaky profile, tight mouth, clear light eyes, set in a
net of innumerable knowing little wrinkles, and the cross-hatching of
tiny scarlet veins that made his hollow cheeks ruddy as Cornish
apples, might have belonged to some aged, ascetic Cardinal, or
venerable Professor of Science, rather than to Baron Helmuth Carl
Bernhard von Moltke, General, Field-Marshal, and Chief of the Great
General Staff of the Prussian Army; whose heraldic motto, _Erst wagen
dann wagen_ summarizes his strategical policy; whose conduct of the
Danish War of '64 and the Austrian War of '66 had placed Prussia in
the forefront as a military nation, under whose banner were soon to
gather the Confederated German States.

Questioned as to the identity of the man at the head of the table,
the long-limbed, heavily molded, powerfully built personage of
five-and-fifty, attired in the undress-uniform of a Colonel of White
Cuirassiers, and wearing the Order of Commander of the Red Eagle, the
citizen would most likely have scowled, the street-boy spat forth
some unsavory epithet, tacked on to a name that was destined to be
inscribed upon the era in divers mediums, inclusive of marble and
iron, brass and gold and silver; lead and fire; bright steel and red
blood.

For this was the Minister to whom diplomats, Parliamentary orators,
and political leader-writers referred when they mentioned Prussia;
the accursed of Ultramontane, the abhorred of Socialists.  Walking
alone through the streets, as, indeed, he loved to do, his keen eye
and huge physical strength had saved him, ere now, from the
assassin's bullet or knife.  And you could not look upon him without
recognizing a Force, all-potent for good or all-dominant in evil, an
enemy to be execrated or a leader to be adored.

The massive, high-domed head was scantily covered, save for a grayish
lock or so above either temple, and a thin thatching behind the
finely shaped, sagacious ears.  The eyebrows were thick--of gray
mixed with darkish brown; the luxuriant brown-gray mustache covering
the large, mobile, sarcastic mouth, grew heavily as any trooper's.
The short, straight nose was rounded at the end like the point of a
broadsword.  And in the indomitable, vital regard of the blue eyes,
partly hidden under thick and level lids, you felt the master-mind,
as they coldly considered some question of finance or diplomacy, or
blazed challenge and defiance, scorn and irony.  And in the sagging
orbital pouches, as in the puffy jowl, you read the unmistakable
signs of bygone orgies, deep potations, marvelous vital powers taxed
to the utmost in the past pursuit of pleasure, as by present
indefatigable, unsleeping labors with brain, voice, and pen in the
service of Throne and State.

The table-talk dealt chiefly, at first, with culinary and
gastronomical matters.  Asparagus soup iced and a clear soup with
vermicelli had preceded the course of fish, placed on the table by
the servants, who had then been dismissed.  A huge dish of Waldbach
trout with green sauce and another, as capacious, of crayfish stewed
in cream with mushrooms, vanished before a double onslaught on the
part of the War Minister and the Chancellor, the Chief of the General
Staff partaking sparingly, as was his wont.

Said his host, smiling and setting down an empty wine goblet:

"You eat nothing, Herr Baron Field-Marshal, whereas I, who come of a
family of great eaters, and His Excellency, who boasts a similarly
inherited capacity, have taken twice of each dish."

"Thanks, thanks, dear Count," said Moltke mildly, glancing downward
at the well-marked hollow behind his middle buttons; "but I do not
like to overload my stomach, particularly at my time of life."

"Being aware of Your Excellency's objection to dishes that are
heavy," the Chancellor continued gravely, but still smiling, "I took
pains to select a menu of light, easily digested things.  What are
three or four dozens of oysters at the commencement of a dinner?"

Von Roon agreed, in a hoarse bass, that set the chandelier-glasses
vibrating:

"Or a few half-pound trout, or a helping or so of stewed crayfish?
Mere nothings--to a strong digestion."

"Mine cannot be strong," the great strategist remarked modestly, "for
I find that an over-plentiful meal oppresses the brain, and hinders
steady thought."

Said the Chancellor, filling from a long-necked bottle one of the
three large crystal goblets that served him as wine-glasses, emptying
it at a draught and setting it down:

"Hah!  Were that known in a certain high quarter at Paris, what a
cargo of delicacies you would presently receive from the Maison
Chevet!"

Von Roon's big voice came in:

"Was not Chevet the Parisian purveyor who supplied the
banker-minister Lafitte with fish for a Dieppe dinner in the time of
the French Monarchy?"

"So!"  The Chancellor, holding his napkin delicately in both hands,
dried the wine from his mustache, and added, turning his great,
slightly bloodshot eyes upon the interrogator.  "And who is now chief
caterer for the Emperor Napoleon the Third."  He added, glancing back
at Moltke, and observing that his glass stood unemptied: "Since Your
Excellency will not eat, let me recommend you the wine, which is of
special quality.  Not only Rüdesheim, but good Rüdesheim.  Ha, ha,
ha!"

The veteran's clear eyes became mere slits in the mass of puckered
wrinkles.  He pushed back his auburn peruke, showing his high-arched
temples, and laughed, revealing gums as healthy as a child's, and
still accommodating three or four staunch old grinders inclined at
various angles, like ancient apple-tree stumps.

"_Nu, nu_!  You are twitting me with my candor to Sultan Mahmoud in
1835; but what else could I say when Chosref Pasha intimated that His
Sublimity required my opinion?  Directly I tasted his wretched wine,
I knew some rogue had sold him an inferior brand, and thus I told him
honestly: 'It is Rüdesheim, Your Majesty, but it is not good
Rüdesheim!'  And with the first of the boxes of tobacco and
cigarettes that came from Constantinople after my return to Germany,
I received the message that the _tutun_ was not only Turkish _tutun_,
but good Turkish _tutun_."  He drank off his wine, ending: "And so my
nephews say it is, for I smoke neither cigarettes nor pipes."

"I smoke pipes," said the Chancellor, stretching a white, muscular
hand toward the bell on the dumb-waiter, "when my doctor prohibits
cigars."  He added: "Pipes of all materials and descriptions--one
sort excepted.  I have no doubt Your Excellency could give it a name."

The War Minister, pondering, knotted his heavy tufted eyebrows, and
presently blew out his cheeks as a man may when the jest baffles his
wit.  The Field-Marshal began to laugh, a gentle chuckle that began
by agitating his lean abdomen, and shaking his bowed but vigorous
shoulders before it widened his mouth into a slit curved gaily at the
corners, and squeezed tears of merriment out of his puckered eyes.

"I'll wager half a pfennig I will name it at the first guess!  You
mean the Calumet of Peace!"

Von Roon barked out a laugh.  The Chancellor nodded, smiling.  Then
two middle-aged, grave-looking male servants in plain black entered
with the third course, and the faces of the diners underwent a
curious change.  They were more suave, and all expression seemed as
though it had been wiped from them.  Until, following on the heels of
the servants (who brought the _entrées_), there appeared a colossal
boarhound, dark tawny in color, with black pointings, short, rounded
ears, massive chest, square muzzle, and red-rimmed eyes.  Fixing
these fierce orbs upon his master with an affection proved not
altogether disinterested by the copious dribbling of his jaws, the
great brute sat upright at his left hand, flogged the carpet with his
heavy tail, and saluted the placing of the dishes on the table with
three gruff barks.

"Aha, Tyras!"

"Hey, then, Tyras!  So they have cut short your furlough, boy!"

"He would tell you, like that sergeant of infantry who was made
postman of a country district after the war of '66, and at whom the
illiterate population--who never got anything but bad news or dunning
letters--used to shoot as a mild hint to keep away altogether, that
all the days are field-days to him.  Speaking as a dog with a master
who walks when he does not ride, and must be waited for when he is
neither riding nor walking."

The Chancellor, smiling, looked at the huge brute, which rose and
laid its massive jowl entreatingly upon his chair-arm, and receiving
no immediate return in caress, lobbed a heavy forepaw pettishly upon
the tablecloth.  A chased silver-gilt salt-cellar, in the shape of a
Bavarian peasant-girl carrying two milk-pails, toppled, and might
have fallen to the floor, but that the Field-Marshal caught it
dexterously, though without being able to prevent the salt being
spilt.

"No harm done.  See!"  He triumphantly set the milk-maid in her place
again: "Only the salt is spilled upon the cloth!"

"Now, if Tyras were superstitious!" commented the host, as a servant
hastened to repair the damage with the aid of a napkin and a
porcelain dessert-plate, "he would be convinced that Madame Tyras and
her sons were not doing as well as might be hoped."

"The bitch has pupped, then?" said Von Roon as a trio of corks
exploded; and the servants, having carried round the dishes, placed
them on the table, set an open bottle of champagne, dewy from the
ice, and enveloped in a damask napkin, at the right of each diner,
and noiselessly quitted the Chinese room.

As the door shut, the Chancellor continued, responding to Roon's
question with a nod, and looking at the Chief of the Great General
Staff:

"However, Tyras is not one of those nervous sires who rend heaven and
earth with outcries if danger threatens one of their offspring.  The
Pomeranian breed are possibly less nervous than the strain at
Sigmaringen.  I think Prince Antony----"

Blurted out the Field-Marshal, bolting a mouthful of cutlet and
crimsoning to the edges of his wig with sudden anger: "May the great
devil fly away with that pompous old sheep's-head!"

"It was not without reason," said the Chancellor, without slackening
in his onslaught upon an _entrée_ of duckling stewed with olives,
"that I arranged for us three to dine without the servants.  Did I
not foresee that the hot blood of the warlike youth would effervesce
in some such expression as that I have just heard!"

Said the old man, still flushed, but laughing, and sipping at a
bumper of dry Sillery:

"He is a sheep's-head, and a pompous one!  He negotiates with Prim,
as head of the Hohenzollern family, quite forgetting the King, it
would appear!  He is very well pleased--he thinks the place will suit
his son capitally!  He sends him on second thoughts to ask the King
if he does not think so.  Then when France hurries her Ambassador to
Ems to inform the King, who has not said 'Ay' or 'Nay' in the matter,
that she will not tolerate a Prince of Prussia on the Throne of
Spain, he writes to the King saying that he is much impressed by the
turn things are taking at Paris, and though he thinks he cannot in
decency break off the affair, perhaps the King will do it for him!
Meanwhile Prince Leopold, who is the chief person concerned--where
withdrawal or acceptance is in question--has quitted Ems and gone
where you please....  Not to his parents' country castle of
Sigmaringen, but to the Tyrol....  Now why to the Tyrol?  This
marching and countermarching--with no definite purpose in it, makes
my blood boil.  Phew!"

And really the perspiration fairly bubbled from the pores of the old
warrior, as he took off his auburn peruke and mopped his dripping
head and face with a large white handkerchief.

The Chancellor, who had been discussing a second helping of the dish
before him, laid down his knife and fork upon their silver-gilt
supporters, unfastened a hook of his undress frock, and said,
withdrawing a small roll of tissue papers and separating one thin
penciled sheet from the rest:

"There is some reason for the Prince's agitation.  This morning a
telegram in cipher--of which this is a fair transcript--was
dispatched from Sigmaringen to Olozaga, the Spanish Ambassador at
Paris.  It conveys the intimation that Prince Antony withdraws from
the candidacy in the name of Prince Leopold.  It was sent by the
French Emperor's secret agent, a Roumanian named Straz."

He went on informing himself, with a quiet side-glance to right and
left, of the effect his communication was producing:

"Perhaps you do not know Straz--a man with the profile and curls of
one of M. Layard's man-god bulls of Nineveh, a living tool that might
have been tempered in the workshop of an Alexander Borgia, or a
Catherine de Medici----"

He stopped to fill one of his great crystal goblets from the
champagne-bottle that stood beside him.  Moltke, indifferent to the
dishes that stood temptingly within reach, had been wiping the inside
of his wig dry with his handkerchief.  Now, oblivious of the wig, and
crumpling it with the handkerchief into a ball, he was squeezing the
ball between his narrow palms as he listened to the speaker.  Von
Roon, who had been busy upon some sweetbreads cooked in sour cream,
paused in the act of helping himself again largely.

"So--so--this fellow--Straz----"  The Chancellor stuttered now and
then, and he did it here effectively--"This uns-scrupulous f-fellow
of whom I am t-talking----"  He drained the big glass to the dregs,
wiped his mustache carefully, and began delicately unfolding more
thin sheets of paper from the small but pregnant wad.

"Ah, yes, where was I?  Th-this morning, the twelfth of July, the
originals of these three telegrams, which are not in cipher, were
sent from Sigmaringen by Prince Antony.  The first, to Marshal Prim,
at Madrid, withdraws his son from the candidacy.  The second, to
Olozaga, recapitulates the wording of this.  The third, ostensibly
addressed to the principal journals of Berlin and Germany, and to the
German Submarine Telegraphic Agencies by order of Prince Leopold of
Hohenzollern, abandons all pretensions to the Spanish scepter, and
restores to Spain her freedom of initiative."

Von Roon bellowed like a nine-inch siege gun:

"What May-madness has the confounded old billy-goat?"

The Chief of the Great General Staff put on his wig, and said,
folding his lean arms upon his sunken chest:

"How has he at Paris managed to frighten the old man?"

The Chancellor said, fixing his full, powerful eyes upon the light
ones twinkling through their wise old puckers:

"The mission of M. Straz, privately sent, upon the advice of the Duke
de Gramont, by the Emperor of France to Sigmaringen (while Count
Benedetti repairs to the King of Prussia at Ems, and a third
emissary, Bartholdi, is sent to menace President Zorilla at
Madrid)--the mission of M. Straz is to terrify the Prince and
Princess with threats of the assassination of one, if not both their
sons."

Commented Moltke, shrugging a shoulder:

"To work on the woman, always--if there is one! ...  Badinguet's
tactics are not new--but they are effective beyond doubt."

"Knave!" came from Roon, in a blurt of indignation

"Says Straz to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern--I give you the exact
words;--'Highness, His Imperial Majesty the Emperor authorizes me to
inform you that a group of Roumanian conspirators are plotting
against the life of your elder son, Prince Charles von
Hohenzollern--now Charles of Roumania.  The threads of this plot
being centered in Paris, it is in the Emperor's power to sever
them--he will do so if Prince Leopold withdraws from the
candidature,--he will not seek to deter the conspirators, should the
Prince prove obstinate.  Reflect in addition that Prince Leopold, as
King of Spain, will have to contend against the plots of Alfonsists
and Carlists--as against the intrigues of Montpensier and other
aspirants to Isabella's vacated throne.  He will not be summoned to
reign--he will be called to a disaster.  Death will sit beside him,
under the Royal canopy.'"

The reader's muscular white hands drew another crackling sheet from
the little roll of papers.  He went on:

"The mother of the two young men was present--as was intended--when
Straz delivered this message from the Emperor.  Naturally the
Princess brought her batteries to work upon the Prince and her
younger son, who, though it is not admitted, was actually present.
She has wept, implored, prayed, fainted, argued for forty-eight
hours----"

The Field-Marshal muttered:

"Poor soul!"

And with his wrinkled hand he rubbed a glistening drop from his
cheek, that was not perspiration.  Von Roon snorted like a dyed old
war-horse:

"Meanwhile, the Imperial Ambassador, Count Benedetti, will be setting
forth the object of his mission to the King!"

Said the Chancellor, letting the words come out softly and
distinctly,--and one would have expected so huge a man to roar after
the fashion of giants, rather than to speak in such mellifluous tones:

"His instructions run thus: '_Say to the King that we have no secret
motive, that we do not seek a pretext for war--and that we only ask
to reach an honorable solution of a difficulty that was not created
by us._'"

"It is honorable, then," said Von Moltke in a tone of childlike
wonder, "to threaten to murder that old woman's two sons?"

"Meanwhile," said the mellifluous, pleasant voice of the Chancellor,
"the Emperor and Marshal le Bœuf have sent Staff-Colonel Gresley
to Algiers with secret orders to MacMahon to embark those troops from
Africa which are most available for service on the Continent, and to
warn the most distant regiments to be at Algiers on the 18th.  The
Generals of his Artillery and Engineers have been dispatched upon a
plain-clothes confidential visit of inspection to the fortresses of
the North-East, all leave has been stopped, and the commanders of
brigades have apprised the staffs of the mobilization offices to
dispatch the orders of recall of the reserves.  This was put into
effect on the 8th.  Upon the same day the order was given to bring
the Infantry regiments up to War strength by the creation of their
Fourth Battalions, and General Blondeau, of the Administrative Branch
of the War Department, has been authorized to exceed his credit by
the sum of a million francs."  He ended, showing his small, regular
teeth, as he smiled agreeably upon his hearers: "The Tuileries system
of Secret Intelligence is certainly excellent, but I do not think we
are so badly served!"

"Badly served!" echoed Roon.  "One would say not!"

"You must be served by the great devil himself and all his devilkins,
Otto, my dear fellow!" said the Chief of the Great General Staff,
with a merry chuckle, "to have all this dished up to you before it is
cold!  Well, well!  Thanks be to the good God--we are not so far
behind these French as we might be!  No, no! not at all so far
behind! ..."

He said this musingly, his startlingly limpid eyes almost hidden by
the wrinkles and puckers, his long, humorous upper lip drawn down and
set firmly on the lower one, as he cupped his sharp chin in the palm
of one wrinkled hand, nursing the elbow appertaining to it in the
palm of-the other hand.

"'So far behind,' do you say?" growled Von Roon.  "_Sapperlot_!  I
should call it a day's march and a half-day's march ahead!"

"It may be--it may be!" said the Field-Marshal placidly.  "God grant
that it prove so!"

"You are as pious as the King to-night," said the Chancellor,
laughing heartily.  "And your God is the God of Battles, we all know!"

"Yes, yes, the Friend Above does not forget this old fellow!" said
the Field-Marshal simply.  "The thousand-ton Krupp gun--whose
acquaintance the Parisians made at the Exposition of 1867,--has been
waiting ever since to make upon them an impression of a different
kind!  Like the gun, I have _bided my time_, as the Scotch say.
Neither the cannon nor myself will last for ever, but to worry is
folly! ... Heaven will not let us rust upon the shelf!"

"'_Mensch ärgere Dich nicht_' is a good proverb," said the
Chancellor, "not only for Your Excellency!  Chained to my study-table
all yesterday and this morning,--horribly handicapped by the absence
of my First Secretary Abeken, who is doing duty with the King at
Ems.--listening to reports, receiving showers of telegrams, dictating
replies in answer to the appeals or expostulations of Foreign
Ministers--sending instructions to Ambassadors, and drinking
Mühlbrunnen water,--which must not be taken when one is vexed or
worried, if one wants it not to play the very devil in one's inside,
I chewed the cud of that proverb, '_Man, do not vex thyself!_' to
keep myself from gnawing my tongue.  That official international
threat of Gramont, uttered in the session of the Corps Législatif of
July 6th,--the filth hurled by the Paris Press--did not cost me a
sleepless night.  But that, after such insults, the King of Prussia
should treat with Benedetti at Ems while the Prussian Foreign
Minister remained at Varzin--stuck in my gizzard as though I had
swallowed a prickle-burr.  It was worse than Olmütz....  I saw
nothing but resignation ahead of me!"

Von Roon agreed:

"To me also it seemed a slight not to the Foreign Minister alone--but
to His Majesty's Government in your person."

The Field-Marshal added, his wrinkled face lengthening dourly:

"I may tell you--there being no ladies present!--the whole affair
acted on me like unripe gooseberries, especially after reading that
sentence in the _Gaulois_, written by a _gamin_ with a finger to his
nose...."

Von Boon thundered:

"'_La Prusse cane_!'  Only say black-dose, rather than sour
gooseberries, and there you have the effect of the words on me!"

Said the Chancellor, with a twinkle of humor:

"They wrought upon myself as an emetocatharsis.  For, repudiating the
slight, and simultaneously expelling from my system the last remains
of compunction, I decided then and there to hurry off from Varzin to
Ems for the purpose of urging upon His Majesty the urgent necessity
for summoning the Reichstag.  The words I meant to use kept drumming
in my skull--_We shall be traitors to ourselves if we do not accept
this challenge.  Without an instant's delay, we must mobilize!_"

Said Roon:

"Why not, when we are prepared to take measures for the safety of the
Rhenish provinces?  We can put Saarbrück in a state of defense in
twenty-four hours, and Mainz in less than forty-eight.  Is it not so,
Herr General Field-Marshal?"

Von Moltke's dry, level voice returned quietly:

"My plan of invasion was drawn up in 1868.  All my arrangements are
made, as I have said.  When His Majesty--when the Chancellor of the
Confederation and Your Excellency give the signal--I go home to my
quarters on the first floor of the south-east wing of the Great
General Staff Department, and dispatch a telegraphic message of three
words..."  He began to laugh, rubbing his hands together.  "Then--you
will see whether I am ready!  All I ask is Opportunity--like Krupp's
thousand-tonner gun!"




XXVI

The Chancellor said, emptying another bumper of champagne:

"This morning the opportunity lay within grasp.  So strongly
convinced was I of this that as my phaeton passed through the village
of Wussow, on the way to the station, 'War is Inevitable' seemed
written on every house.  The old clergyman stood before his parsonage
door and greeted me with a hand-wave.  My answer was the gesture of a
thrust in _carte_ and _tierce_.  For me the three words: 'War is
Declared' replaced the lettering of the advertisement posters on the
walls of the stations the special rushed through.  Yet, though I had
notified His Majesty of the advisability of summoning me to his
assistance, I received, even as I stepped out of the train at the
Stettin Station, a vacillating telegram from him, enjoining delay."
He added, laughing: "Together with a message in cipher from our
Prussian Ambassador at Paris, informing me that it has been given
forth from the tribune of the Corps Législatif that had not Prince
Leopold retreated from the Spanish candidature, to prevent the war
with which the Emperor threatens us--the Government of Napoleon III.
would have extorted a letter of apology from the King."

Roon could not speak.  Said Moltke:

"The Gallic cock crows loudly!  Such a letter would nicely recoup
France for the humiliation of Sadowa."

"Did France succeed in extorting it," retorted the Chancellor, "but
she has got to get it first!"

The forehead of Roon was black as thundercloud.  He unhooked his
collar, and wiped his congested face.  The Field-Marshal thrust his
hand under his wig perplexedly, saying:

"That His Majesty should continue to treat with Benedetti after all
these insults and outrages....  It passes my understanding, I am fain
to confess!"

"The Count himself would have no difficulty in reading the riddle,"
said the Chancellor, shrugging.  "He is--according to his own
conviction--a diplomat of the first water, a statesman of infinite
finesse and irresistible persuasions.  Yet he did not coax us into
the Emperor's trap in 1867.  Speaking of that, I have in my pocket
something that will presently jump out of it, a testimony in his own
handwriting that he is not quite so clever a fellow as he thinks!"

"To-day," boomed Roon, "I met Prince Gortchakoff.  We were riding in
the Unter den Linden when he stopped.  He spoke of the King's
age--the merest allusion in reference to a site he pointed out as
being suitable for a statue.  His Majesty was to be represented
holding a wreath of laurel with the dates of 1864 and 1866 upon it.
While emblematical figures of Peace, and the Genius of the Domestic
Hearth, were shown disarming him of his helmet and sword."

"A sneer thoroughly merited," said the Chancellor, "by these days of
hesitation!"  He added: "The Genius of the Domestic Hearth is for the
moment at Coblenz.  However, wifely expostulations can be conveyed by
telegram.  Her Majesty's cry is, '_Remember Jena and Tilsit and avoid
war, even at the cost of national dishonor!_'  Should these
entreaties of the Queen prevail, she will merit the reproof of Sir
Walter Scott--I think it was Sir Walter Scott!--who addressed to his
grayhound, Maida, who had torn up--unless I err?--the manuscript of a
newly-completed novel.  '_Poor thing! thou little knowest the injury
thou hast done!_'"

"Women are less reasonable," declared Von Boon, "than bitches, to my
mind!"

"Nay, nay!" said the Field-Marshal with sudden anger.  "Maida was not
a bitch, and I cannot agree with you!  Great and noble female
characters have been, and exist now--not only in the pages of
history-books.  It may be that Her Majesty is prejudiced--her
influence has not always been favorable to the adoption of measures I
would have counseled.  But she is high-minded!--a great lady, and
truly devoted as a wife.  And with this ring upon my finger"--he held
up his wrinkled left hand and showed the narrow band of gold--"it
would ill become me to sit still and hear women likened to the
unreasoning beasts that perish, when for all I know my beloved wife
Mary is standing by my side!"

He drank a sip of wine, and continued more mildly:

"The good God took her to Himself twelve years ago, in the fullness
of life and strength and English beauty!--while I, more than thirty
years her senior, hang yet upon the tree.  On the top of the hill at
Crusau is her tomb, where one day I shall lie beside her.  But before
that day"--the brave old eyes snapped fire, and he wrinkled up his
ancient eagle-beak as though he savored the fumes already--"it may be
that I shall smell powder again!"

"Let us drink to that!" said the Chancellor.  As they filled their
glasses there came a peculiar, scratching knock on the door.

"Come in, Bucher!" cried the host harshly, and the summons was
answered by one of His Excellency's Privy Councillors of Legation, a
little, stooping old gentleman, with a large hooked nose and a
grizzled mustache and whiskers, who was dressed in a
chocolate-colored, single-breasted frock-coat, tightly fastened with
gilt buttons, and who wore a black satin stock, with the tongue of
the buckle sticking up among the locks at the back of his neck, and
baggy black cloth trousers ending in the feet of a Prussian
Lifeguard, encased in huge and shapeless cloth boots; these moved him
noiselessly to the elbow of the Chancellor, to whom he whispered,
handing him a card, large and square, and unmistakably feminine:

"And so, as Madame was urgent ... Your Excellency knows what women
are!"

"Thanks to some early studies in femininity, I am credited," said the
Chancellor, "with knowing a great deal too much about the sex.  Where
have you put Madame?"

Bucher answered, raising himself on his toes to approach his lips to
the large, well-shaped ear; for even seated, the Chancellor
overtopped him:

"In the gracious Countess's little red damask back drawing-room."

"It is doubtful, my good Bucher, whether--did she know how she was
honored--the gracious Countess would welcome her visitor."

"Alas!  Your Excellency!" pleaded the Councillor, "but Her Excellency
does not know!--and the room contains nothing valuable.  Only a few
family pictures--no china, silver, or _bric-à-brac_.  Nothing that it
would be any use to steal!"

"Come, come!" expostulated the Minister, his blue eyes alight with
cynical amusement, "you must not speak of Madame as though she were a
house-thief.  Our good Bucher," he went on, turning jestingly to his
table companions, "sees little difference between a person who picks
brains for pay, and sells the pickings, and another person who picks
locks and steals silver vases and cups.  Rather a reflection on the
Diplomatic Service, now I think of it!"

"_Ach!  Herr Gott!_" said the Councillor in alarm, "I cast no
reflection, Your Excellency knows it!  Only the woman is of light
reputation----"

"And may be light-fingered into the bargain.  Possibly--" said the
Chancellor, "and all the better if she be so!  We will risk my wife's
family portraits in her vicinity until after dinner.  Have coffee and
liqueurs sent to her, and beg her to wait a while."  He added, "Let
them put cigarettes on the tray--I have no doubt she smokes tobacco.
And as the smell will have passed off before my wife and daughter
return from Varzin, neither of the ladies will ever know of the
desecration of the red damask back drawing-room."

And as Bucher shuffled out of the room to execute his errand, his
Chief rang the bell for the third course.

"By the way, Excellency," said the War Minister, as the demure
servants out of livery removed the empty dishes: "that Frenchwoman of
poor Max Valverden's is driving about Berlin."

"So!" commented the host, turning an inscrutable face upon the
Minister.  "She must find it very warm, and insufferably dull."

"She consoled herself," said Roon, "not long after Count Max's
suicide."

"There," burst out the Field-Marshal, "was an incomprehensible
catastrophe!  That young man--who was military attaché at our Embassy
in Paris until the return of the Allied Armies of Great Britain and
France from the Crimea in 1856; and in 1866, ten years later, joined
my staff in Austria as third _aide-de-camp_--I cannot understand
it--he must have been demented!"

He unbuttoned the frock-coat, showing an unstarched, but scrupulously
clean white shirt and vest of white nankeen, and taking a little
silver snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, laid it down carefully
upon the tablecloth as he said:

"In '56 he brought his mistress from Paris with him--he was
infatuated with her spirit and beauty.  They said she was the wife of
an officer in Grandguerrier's Division, who had served throughout the
whole of the War in the Crimea."

"A _chef d'escadron_ of Mounted Chausseurs, who seems to have taken
his wife's desertion philosophically," commented the Chancellor.

The Field-Marshal took a pinch of snuff, and gravely shook his head.

"Of that I know nothing, but there was no meeting.  Max Valverden
assured me, on his honor, that an opportunity for the challenge had
been given.  Otherwise the young Count could not have continued in
our Prussian Army--one would naturally have been obliged to retire
him."  He sneezed and went on: "My personal acquaintance with
Valverden began ten years later.  He served me--excellently.  One
should always give due praise to the dead.  But when he returned from
Austria--then happened the tragedy, at Schönfeld in the Altenwald,
where lies his patrimonial property, and where the lady waited.
And--he shot himself, upon the very night of his return to her."

"Not," interposed the cool, level voice of the Chancellor, "not being
expected until noon of the day following."

"Of that I know nothing," said Moltke, turning his ascetic hairless
face full upon the speaker.  "What I know is that an officer who
faithfully served his country and whom I had recommended for
distinction, at the earliest opportunity--died by his own hand!  How
the woman was left, I cannot tell you."

"Count Maximilian von Schön-Valverden had provided for Madame de
Bayard when summoned upon active Service," said the Chancellor.  "His
family did not contest the will, and she is not badly off.
Therefore," he added with a smile, "when she condescends to serve my
Intelligence Department as a spy, you may suppose she does not do it
too cheaply.  I must refer to my perambulating ledger, Bucher, before
I quote you the exact figures of the sum I am to hand her to-night.
She is a true daughter of the horseleech, who cries '_Give, give,
give!_' incessantly.  But all the same I am indebted to her for those
remarkably interesting particulars concerning the Mission of M. de
Straz to Prince Antony."

"So!" ejaculated Von Roon in astonishment.  The Field-Marshal rubbed
his chin and turned his clear eyes upon the speaker, who went on
smilingly:

"M. de Straz is susceptible--a fatal fault in a conspirator.  Madame
is still seductive, with a figure like Circe, ropes of black silk
hair, a skin of cream, though the roses are bought ones! and eyes the
color--exactly the color of old, pale tawny port.  Now, when you
reflect that she is waiting in my wife's red boudoir to interview me
in my next spare moment--do you fear for my hitherto unassailable
virtue, or regard me as proof against such charms?"

"I never bet more," said Moltke, "than half a pfennig, and then only
when I play cards with my niece."

"I will wager you proof," cried Roon, "for two hundred thalers!"

"I can hardly bet upon my own marital infidelity!" said the
Chancellor, laughing, as a servant uncovered the dish newly placed
before him.  "Will Your Excellency take some of this?"

"This" was the savory _pièce de resistance_ of the masculine banquet,
a lamb of six weeks, roasted to a golden brown, basted with marrow,
and surrounded with tiny cucumbers stuffed with seasoning.

Moltke accepted the offer with alacrity, indifferent to the charms of
veal with tomatoes and aubergines.  Von Roon, declining, hurled
himself upon a fillet of beef _jardinière_, and hacked a huge steak
from its surface as with a sword, rather than a carving-knife.  The
Chancellor, plying his gleaming weapons delicately, liberally
supplied his guest and piled his own plate, saying as he launched
himself upon its contents with unabated appetite:

"Confederations may disappoint us--Kings may deceive us--while our
teeth and our digestions faithfully serve us, we can find some zest
in life.  When I retire, I shall cultivate vegetables, plant
forest-trees, rear trout, breed cattle, sheep, pigs, and
poultry--drop my hereditary patronymic as I shed my titles of office
and be known to all posterity as the Farmer of Varzin!"

The hall-bell had been heard to ring a moment previously.  There was
another scratching signal on the door, and Bucher appeared,
manifestly excited and carrying a telegraphic dispatch.

"What now?" asked the Chancellor, finishing a mouthful.

"A telegram from Ems----" began the Councillor.

The imperious hand whipped it from between his pudgy fingers; the
masterful voice demanded, as the envelope was rent open:

"The decipherer has not left?"

"Excellency, no!" twittered the Councillor, agitated by the
portentous frown of his Chief, and by the grave faces of Moltke and
Roon.  The paper was thrust back to him with the curt order:

"Get this deciphered--do not delay!"

And as the Legation Councillor vanished, Bismarck said with a short
laugh, bending his powerful regard on the gaunt, black stare of the
War Minister:

"It is from the King, and will not please us.  We may make up our
minds beforehand to that.  Yet I drink this glass to the honor of
Prussia!"  And filling his great bumper glass from a fresh bottle
that had been placed at his elbow, he gulped down at least a pint of
the creaming nectar of the Widow Clicquot, and his guests, in smaller
measures, pledged the same toast.  After that they sat in silence,
the Chancellor alone continuing to eat with appetite--until the
Councillor's big feet came shuffling back again.

"The copy, Excellency, 200 groups altogether," he began, "signed by
the Herr Privy Councillor von Abeken, at His Majesty's command."

The papers he held were whipped away from him.  The Chancellor
read--and his countenance most grimly altered.  His brows grew
thunderous, trenches dug themselves along his forehead, caves
appeared about his blazing eyes, and the pouches under them
portentously bagged.  The heavy mustache might shade the mouth and
chin, but could not hide that they were changed to granite.  He
passed his firm hand over them and said, his incisive tones veiled
with a curious hoarseness:

"Mr. Councillor of Legation, you will now leave us.  When I ring the
bell it summons you.  Pray tell Dr. Busch that his services will be
needed.  Some articles must be written for the Press to-night."

He said, as the door closed behind Bucher, and the smile that
accompanied the words was grim and cynical:

"Well, gentlemen, we have got our final slap in the face!  The Press
organs of the Ultramontane and the Democrats will call us by our
nicknames to-morrow: 'Old Hellfire' and 'Death's Chess-Player' and
'The Pomeranian Ogre' and all the rest.  But--I swear to you that no
enemy of mine will ever despise me as I now despise myself!"

Roon and Moltke regarded him in silence.  He went on speaking, still
with that strange hoarseness:

"Some have called me the Iron Chancellor.  I will tell you by what
title Wilhelm the First of Prussia will go down to posterity.  Men
will speak of him as the Fluid King.  It is written in the
Scriptures,--all day the phrase has haunted me,--'Unstable as water,
thou shalt not excel!'"

At a glance from the War Minister, Moltke rose up suddenly.  His
stooping scholar's body sprang upright as a lance.  He said, and the
words rang clear as steel on steel:

"Your Excellency, I deplore the necessity of imposing silence upon
you.  But the obligation of my military oath, and your own----"

He paused as the great figure of his host reared up at the head of
the table.  He saluted the Field-Marshal and said coldly:

"Herr General Field-Marshal, the rebuke is merited.  Holding the
King's commission as Colonel of White Cuirassiers of the _Landwehr_,
I have spoken treasonably.  Does your Excellency wish me to ring for
my sword?"

Moltke's wrinkled face flashed into amusement, as the Chancellor
imperturbably stretched his hand to the bell beside him.  He said,
laughing:

"Colonel Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, I accept your apology.  I
will limit the period of your arrest to confinement to this room
until conclusion of dinner, on condition that you read now this
message from Ems."

The Chancellor saluted, and glancing at Roon, who was now standing,
gloomy and downcast, "We look," he said, "like three mourners about a
bier.  It is, in fact, Prussia who lies dead upon the table.
However, judge of the situation for yourselves."

And he read out the famous telegram handed in at Ems at three-thirty:

"_Count Benedetti spoke to me on the Promenade in order to demand
from me finally, in a very important manner, that I should authorize
him to telegraph at once to Paris that I bound myself for all future
time never again to give my consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew
their candidature.  I refused at last somewhat sternly, as it is
neither right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind _à
tout jamais_.  Naturally I told him that I had received no news; and
as he was earlier informed from Paris and Madrid than myself, he
could clearly see that my Government once more had no hand in the
matter._"

"Ei-ei!" broke in Moltke, "'_Somewhat sternly_' ...  '_Naturally I
told_' ... '_Neither right nor possible,_' and then '_no hand in the
matter!_'  Do I hear the King--or have my ears played tricks on me?"

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_" exploded Roon.  "Well might one ask 'Is this
the master or the servant speaking?'  But go on, go on, I pray your
Excellency!"

The reader had transformed his face to an expressionless mask that
might have been wrought in stone or metal.  Now the tell-tale
huskiness of fierce emotion cleared from his voice.  He resumed:

"This closes His Majesty's personal communication.  Herr Privy
Councillor Abeken continues to the end."

Said Moltke: "Let us hear what little Abeken has got to say to you."

The cold, incisive voice recommenced reading:

"_His Majesty commands me to inform you, that he has since received a
letter from the Prince.  His Majesty, having told Count Benedetti
that he was awaiting news from the Prince, has decided, upon the
representation of Count Eulenburg and myself, not to receive Count
Benedetti again, but only to let him be informed through an
_aide-de-camp_ that His Majesty has now received from the Prince
confirmation of the news Benedetti has already received from Paris,
and has nothing further to say to the Ambassador.  His Majesty leaves
it to Your Excellency whether Benedetti's fresh demand and its
rejection should not be at once communicated both to our Ambassadors
and to the Press representatives._"

The close of the Royal communication plopped into a pool of silence.
The Chancellor coughed, and said with his characteristic stutter:

"The-the laxity and diffuseness of the verbiage of this dispatch
l-lul-leave me in no doubt as to the favorable effect the Ems waters
have already wrought upon the constitution of His Majesty!"

Roon barked his laugh.  Moltke raised his thoughtful head from his
breast and said laconically:

"It gives me the belly-ache to listen to such rubbish.  Are we German
men or German mice?"

The Chancellor shrugged and said:

"More than ever it is clear that my position is untenable.  The King,
under pressure of threats mingled with entreaties, has permitted
himself to be heckled by the Emperor's Franco-Italian emissary.  He
ignores my urgent request that he should refer Benedetti to his
Foreign Minister.  Now, by the medium of an inferior official, he
tells me that I may acquaint the representatives of the State and the
Press--that nothing is settled and no definite end in view!  What is
settled is, that I resign!"

Von Roon called out harshly, striking a sinewy fist upon the table:

"Your Excellency will not leave your friends in this extremity?"

Moltke turned to him half whimsically, half pleadingly:

"For our sake, Otto, stick by the old wagon!"

The Chancellor said, with a sudden softening of the grim lines of his
strong face, and of the eyes that had been fixed and expressionless:

"You talk, both of you, like two babes in the wood.  As far as
regards my personal influence to sway the King or control the feeling
of the Reichstag--another hand may guide the State as well as this of
mine.  Yet, were it possible--having already the King's
permission--to produce a somewhat concentrated version of this
verbose telegram....  Has either of you a pencil?--mine has been
mislaid.."

"Here, take mine!" said the Field-Marshal eagerly.

The Chancellor took the offered pencil with a brief nod of thanks,
swept the silver-gilt milkmaid ruthlessly aside, and spreading the
forms containing the Royal dispatch on the space she had occupied,
pored over them for a moment, frowning heavily, before the red-chalk
crayon began to play its part.  Words were struck out--then whole
sentences....

"Ah, ah!" said Moltke, beaming.  "He has finished at last.  Now let
us hear what it sounds like with its mane cropped and its tail
docked?"

"Reduced," said the Chancellor, lifting his great eyes from the
red-crayoned papers, "without addition or alteration, the message
might run thus..."

He read:

"_After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of
Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the Imperial
Government of France by the Royal Government in Spain, the French
Ambassador at Ems further demanded of His Majesty the King that he
would authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King
bound himself for all future time never again to give his consent
should the Princes of Hohenzollern renew their candidature._"

"Good, very good!" growled Roon.

"That seems to me excellent!" said Moltke, twinkling.

The Chancellor finished:

"_His Majesty the King thereupon decided not again to receive
Benedetti, the French Ambassador, and sent the aide-de-camp on duty
with the information that His Majesty had nothing further to say to
him!_"

"_Bravo, bis!_" roared Roon.

"Why," said Moltke, rubbing his hands delightedly, "now it has a
different ring altogether.  Before it sounded like a parley.  Now it
is a fanfare of defiance!  Sentences like these are worthy of a King!"

"And there can be no accusations of falsification," said the
Chancellor, bending his powerful regard upon his two colleagues.
"The Bund Chancellor carries out what the Prussian monarch commands.
He communicates this text by telegraph to all our Embassies and to
the Press agencies.  Is it his fault if its published words provoke
the Gallic cock to show fight?"

"I understand," said the War Minister joyfully, "that we should be
the party attacked first.  And we shall be, and we shall win!  Our
God of old lives, and will not let us perish!"

"Has Your Excellency nothing to say to me?" asked the Chancellor,
fixing his great eyes on the face of Moltke, now radiant with
childlike happiness.

"Were I a poet," returned the joyous old artist in war, seizing the
hand outstretched to him across the table, and wringing it between
both his own, "I should crown you with a wreath of laurel inscribed
'_Hail to thee, Guardian of Prussia's honor!_' or something of that
kind.  Being what I am, I say that you are what my English nephews
would call '_a trump_!'  As you said this morning when you quitted
Varzin, 'War Is Inevitable!'"  He added, hitting himself a resounding
thump in the chest: "And if I may but live to lead our armies in such
a war--then the devil may come directly we have conquered these
Frenchmen and fetch away this crumbling old carcass!"  He added, with
a change to gravity: "I do not say my soul, for I am a decent
Christian.  Hey, look here, our dinner has got cold!"

It was true; the viands were stagnant in the dishes.  The fillet sat
in the center of a stagnant lake of congealed gravy; the roasted
lamb, reduced by the onslaughts of the Chancellor to a partial
skeleton, was covered with a frosting of rich white fat.  He said,
with a laugh that clattered against walls and ceiling like a
discharge of musketry, and reaching for the bell that would summon
Bucher:

"It does not matter; my cook has always a second menu ready in case
of delays or accidents.  While Bucher communicates to our Embassies
and the European Press Agencies the concentrated essence of His
Majesty's telegram--while hundreds of thousands of handbills are
being printed that shall disseminate the text throughout Germany, and
Busch writes the articles that shall put the needful complexion on
this affair--we will order up the Moet and Chandon White Star--I am
thirsty after so much talking!--and eat our dinner again!"




XXVII

Ever since the King, returning from the baths of Ems, had been met at
the railway-station by his Under-Secretary of State bearing France's
declaration of war,--a huge, orderly crowd, compact of all classes
and callings, had ceaselessly rolled through the streets of Berlin,
chanting with its thousands of sturdy lungs "_Heil dir im
Siegerkranz_" and the "_Wacht am Rhein_" until its patriotic fervor
reached a state of ebullition only to be relieved by volleys of
cheers.

Jammed in the solid mass of bodies blackening the Unter den Linden
and packing the Opera-Platz to suffocation,--until the bronze
equestrian statue of the Great Friedrich, opposing the eastern
courtyard gateway of the small stuccoed Palace, reared above a
tossing sea of heads,--P. C. Breagh tasted the raptures of
emancipation from the mill-round, and drank in news at every pore.

For this was life in earnest....  With the red-hot cigar-end of a
corpulent merchant burning the back of his neck, and the crook of a
market woman's blue-cotton umbrella imperiling his left eye; while
the sword-hilt of a gigantic Sergeant of Uhlans insinuated itself
between his third and fourth ribs on the right side, and the huge
flaxen chignon of a servant-girl, armed with a capacious
market-basket crammed with meat, fish, and vegetables for family
consumption, bobbed itself into his mouth whenever he opened that
feature to cheer, or gasp for air, heavily burdened with the fumes of
beer, schnaps, herring-salad, garlic, sauerkraut, and perspiring
humanity, he was happier than ever he had been before.

The King, it was said, was holding a council with his Ministers and
Generals in his study on the ground-floor of his Palace looking on
the Opera-Platz.  Presently His Majesty might be expected to come out.

The tall, elderly, white-whiskered officer in the undress uniform of
the Prussian foot-guards--a blue tunic with red facings, silver
buttons and epaulettes--had already appeared upon the balcony of a
window overlooking the Linden, and touched his spiked helmet in
response to the frenzied acclamations of his scarlet, perspiring
subjects, whose staring eyes and open mouths a Berlin dust-storm was
filling with peppery grit.

Presently the King had moved back into the room behind him, and
returned with the Queen, a tall, thin, elegant lady in half-mourning,
who was weeping; people said, because she hated the thought of war,
and had besought her husband, on her knees, to truckle to the
Napoleon at Paris, and thus avert hostilities.

When the royal couple had retired amid plaudits of a somewhat less
enthusiastic kind, the people had demanded the Crown Prince; and the
King had stepped out yet again with his hand on the shoulder of the
heir-apparent, a tall and stalwart man of thirty-nine, with a clear
red-and-white complexion, setting off his well-cut features, kindly
blue eyes, and flowing beard of yellow-brown.

_Unser Fritz!_--his manly good looks and the Order of Merit shining
on his general's uniform had provoked fresh outbursts of patriotic
enthusiasm, in which the gray-powdered foliage of the overrated
linden-trees, limply resting during a sudden lull of the dust-storm,
had been wildly agitated, and the very street-lamps had rocked.

But when the King, turning to his heir, gave him his hand,--when the
son, reverently bending, raised it to his lips, and the father with
manifest emotion embraced him,--there had fallen a silence of
sympathetic emotion....  Then the great martial figure had reared
erect again and, stepping to the front of the balcony, had shouted to
the people:

"_Krieg!  Mobil!_"

"Mobilization!... War!..."


All the shouting that had gone before was no more than the squealing
of a kindergarten compared with the mighty roar that greeted these
two pregnant words!  The scorching, dusty blue sky-dome, now tinged
with sandy-pink sunset toward the Brandenburg Gate, seemed to quiver
with the upward rush of it.  And--not by accident--from the forest of
flagstaffs mounted on the Palace, the Opera House, and the buildings
contingent,--as down the whole length of the Linden to the
Ministerial palaces of the Wilhelm Strasse,--the black-and-white Flag
of Prussia and the Hohenzollern banner of white with the black eagle
and the cross of the old Teuton Order, broke and fluttered on the
sandy breeze.

The National Anthem broke out once more, and the war-song, "_Ich bin
ein Preusse_."  The King retired on his son's arm manifestly overcome
with weariness.  Still the vast crowd of heated faces, set with
shining eyes, and holed with roaring mouths, persistently turned
toward those ground-floor windows of the Palace.  _Something more
yet!_ asked all the gaping mouths and staring eyes.


But the blinds of the monarch's study were pulled down, unmistakably
signifying that all was over for the present....  The central valves
of the great gilded Palace gates were now shut, leaving open only the
smaller carriage-way, through which mounted _aides_ and orderly
officers conveying dispatches presently began to stream.  The
carriages of Ministers and other State officials followed these,
while lesser personages, emerging from the exit left for pedestrians,
began to hail cab-drivers from the stand of hackneys on the Linden
side of the Opera House.  Swearing, the frustrated Jehus of these
vehicles laid about them with their whips in the endeavor to force
their animals through the solid crowd....

A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante.  There were
cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets appeared in the crowd.  It
surged and swayed....  The guardians of the law had drawn their
cutlasses and were beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland
upon their heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to
effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to hire them.
Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and breast-bone of P. C. Breagh
became suffocating.  Lifted from his feet, he was carried backward
and forward by rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as
the roaring in his ears became louder.  Just as his eyelids dropped
and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful hand caught him by
the coat-collar, and a solid rampart of human flesh interposed
between his lately-drifting body and the waves of the human sea that
raged beyond.

Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled against
the railings of the Palace courtyard facing the Unter den Linden, and
that a big man in a loose black waterproof rain-cloak and
broad-leaved black felt hat was holding to a railing on each side of
him and warding off the rushes.

"Th-thanks!  I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was beginning, when the
swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking of the cutlassed drowned his
voice.  Yet another voice, masculine, resonant, and imperious,
dominated all others; it cried:

"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"

And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed came another
order:

"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland.  Let the people
disperse quietly to their homes!"

And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We will so!" in a
crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and began to split up and move
away in sections, singing "_Heil dir im Siegerkranz_" in sonorous
unison.  When through the Palace gates came a small and shabby
brougham drawn by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman
in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military cockade evoked
another whirlwind of enthusiasm....

"Moltke!  It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one another, and the old
General, who sat alone in the carriage, the lean, stooping,
septuagenarian in the spiked helmet, whose thin, ascetic face was
rosy with suppressed excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled
good-humoredly between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of
humanity in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in
acknowledgment of the cheers.

"Moltke!  Long live our Moltke!  But where has Otto got to!" hiccuped
an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge of the brougham window.  He
continued in the midst of a silence born of consternation: "What has
become of the Big Pomeranian?  We would have--hic!--carried him home
shoulder-high for this week's--hic!--work he has done!"

Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back, as the venerable
expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and said, popping his
auburn-wigged head out of the brougham window:

"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend on it!  Now,
children, let me get back to my maps!"

"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?" bellowed
another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal answered, pointing the
jest with his keenest twinkle:

"You want to know how things are going there?  Well, the wheat has
suffered from the drought, but acorns and potatoes promise to be
plentiful, and pumpkins will be big this year!"

And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for the brougham of
the Chief of the General Staff, and the joke was sown broadcast over
Germany before the end of half an hour.  For were not Moltke's acorns
the oblong, round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his
potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder steel
breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian field-artillery,
and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound projectiles fired by the
siege-guns of nine centimeters' bore? ...


The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between P. C. Breagh and
the battering onslaughts of the crowd shook with laughter as the
brougham moved on through a lane that continuously opened in the mass
of bodies and closed when it had passed....  Then their owner settled
the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said in
well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled face and
powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who was thanking him in
his best German for his timely assistance:

"Do not thank me so effusively.  I have a habit of sometimes saving a
man's life!  Yours happened to be in peril; there is no need to say
more!"

The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost
contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache, showed the
small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed, as he added in his
admirable English, fastening a button of the thin black waterproof
cloak which had been disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently
to show that it covered some sort of military uniform:

"Save this,--that I happen to possess a son about your age, and
should not care to lose him!"

And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless with the
greatness of the adventure that had befallen him.  For the owner of
the bulldog face with the fierce blue eyes blazing over their heavy
orbital pouches, was the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the
Ultramontane and Socialist students three years before, as the Berlin
express-train passed through the station of Schwärz-Brettingen--the
all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant when diplomats and Press
leader-writers referred to "Prussia."


What did he on foot in those packed, roaring thoroughfares, where the
assassin's dagger or revolver might play its part so safely?
Perhaps, like the Third Napoleon, whose peacock bubble of Empire
might now have reached the point of bursting, Count Bismarck believed
in his fortunate star....

Ah! what was that round bright object lying on the pavement?  P. C.
Breagh, still dazed with the magnitude of the thing that had befallen
him, stooped and picked, it up.

It was a medal of silver, with the Prussian Eagle enameled in red
upon the obverse, and a name which left no doubt as to the identity
of P. C. Breagh's rescuer.  Upon, the reverse was the inscription:
"_Fur Rettung aus Gefahr_"--"For Saving From Danger."  With the date
of the 24th June, 1842....

No doubt the Chancellor prized this, the decoration earned at
twenty-four for saving his orderly-groom and another private from
drowning, when serving as _Landwehr_ cavalry officer with the
Stargaard Regiment of Hussars.  Well, he should have it back,--but
into no hands but his would P. C. Breagh surrender it,--P. C. Breagh,
who had been cast out with mockery from the editorial offices of one
daily and two evening newspapers, when he had offered--at a rate of
astounding cheapness,--to supply their columns with material drawn
from the experiences of one who had never previously enjoyed an
opportunity of seeing the thing called War.

One Editor had dealt with him drastically, pitching his card into the
waste-paper basket, and saying, "No!  Get out with you!"  A second
had whistled up a tube and called down a sub-editor, and said to him,
"Look at this!"  The third had preached a brief but pithy sermon on
presumption and cocksureness, winding up with the intimation that if
P. C. Breagh ever found himself at the seat of war and in possession
of any experiences worth recording, he might submit them for
consideration if he chose.

These men would never know it, but they were profoundly humiliated.
At least one of them had lost a half-column, striking the note of
personal adventure to the clink of shekels of fine gold.  As for Mr.
Knewbit ... P. C. Breagh could almost hear him chuckling--had only to
shut his eyes to see the poker, sketching out headings on the Coram
Street kitchen wall:

  "ADVENTURE OF YOUNG ENGLISHMAN.

  WAR CORRESPONDENT IN BERLIN.

  CRUSHED BY THE CROWD.

  RESCUED BY BISMARCK.

  THE IRON HAND SAVES A LIFE!"


Meanwhile, the medal had to be returned to the hands of its owner,
who must, P. C. Breagh was firm on that!--consent to receive it from
the hands of the finder, if he wanted it back again.  P. C. Breagh
knew the Foreign Office, in the Wilhelm Strasse--the shabbiest
residence in all that street of official palaces--with its
high-pitched, red-tiled Mansard roof, its shabby gray stuccoed front
(a main building with two short wings, pierced by twelve windows, and
decorated with a sham-Hellenic frieze and shallow pilasters),--and
its big, park-like garden stretching away behind.

So, clutching the precious token, P. C. Breagh plunged back into the
crowd.  It was dense, but no longer solid, and, still lustily
singing, with intervals of cheering, it bore him down the Linden as
far as the Brandenburg Gate.

There it split into three vociferating rivers of humanity.  One of
which streamed north-westward toward the offices of the Great General
Staff, where Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, was busy over his maps!
Another, desirous of refreshment, surged onward in the direction of
the Thiergarten.  The third flowed down the street of palaces, and
with it went P. C. Breagh.




XVIII

The Foreign Office knocker was a colossal funereal wreath, of sooty
bronze laurel, that wakened hollow startling echoes in the tomb-like
void of a grim stone vestibule.

The vestibule lay at the end of a glass-roofed passage.  On the right
was a window, behind the window gleamed an eye, belonging to the
Chancery janitor who had manipulated the door-levers.  The door
banged behind P. C. Breagh, and his hope climbed a central flight of
stairs, gray-white marble, with bronze balusters badly in need of
cleaning.  The staircase was covered with worn Turkey carpet, was
lighted from above by a green and gold cupola, and guarded by two
conventional figures of sphinxes, carved in shiny blackish stone.

All these details the eye of P. C. Breagh gleaned over the arm of the
Chancellor's door-porter, a seven-foot East Prussian, who wore plain
black official livery and carried no gold-headed staff, yet would
have snubbed the Rector of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen had
he presented himself in this unceremonious way.

"What does he want?  The young man must know that His Excellency the
Royal Chancellor of the North German Confederation is engaged upon
State business--not to be approached by strangers having no
appointments or credentials previously obtained.  An introduction to
His Excellency is indispensable.  Where has the young man lived that
he does not know that?"

To which the young man thus addressed could only reiterate that he
deeply regretted the absence of a letter of introduction, and that
his credentials could only be displayed to His Excellency himself.

"It is likely!"  The porter's forehead corrugated with suspicion:
"Thus is he approached by lunatics and dangerous persons, armed with
crazy petitions or lethal weap----"

"Bosh!"

The English word made the porter leap in his square-toed,
steel-buckled half-shoes.  Recklessly P. C. Breagh went on:

"I'm neither a lunatic nor an assassin...  It's just a case of
_Rettung aus Gefahr_.  Two lives saved in the year 1842, and another
less than an hour ago....  Send that message to His Excellency, and
he'll see me, I believe!"

"He believes!" ... snorted the porter indignantly.

A little, stooping, shabbily dressed old man in a chocolate-colored
frock-coat with gilt buttons came shuffling across the vestibule
carrying a handful of papers, telegrams they appeared to be.  He had
paused to listen to the latter part of the colloquy, holding his head
on one side, as though the better to focus his sharp gray glance on
the dusty, obtrusive young Englishman crowned with a sun-burnt Oxford
straw hat, attired in a well-worn brown Norfolk jacket,
knickerbockers and heather-mixture woolen stockings, and shod with
stout, black, leather-laced, hob-nailed boots.

"He believes!" exclaimed the porter as though referring to the
chocolate-coated old gentleman.  "Will not the highly well-born Herr
Legation-Councillor order that I summon Grams and Engelberg, and have
this presumptuous person thrown into the street?"

"Softly, softly, my good Niederstedt!" advised the little
chocolate-coated old gentleman.  He added, shuffling forward in his
immense black cloth boots over the slippery marble pavement of the
vestibule: "It has occurred to me that an utterance of this young
man's referred to an article that has been lost by His Excellency."
He added, fixing his sharp, gray, jackdaw's eyes on the face of the
young man: "Not valuable, but worth recovering--purely as a memento
of the past!..."

Said Carolan bluntly:

"I did refer to such an article.  In fact, I have it on me!"

A finger and thumb, stained with snuff, dipped into the Councillor's
waistcoat pocket.  He said, secretly conveying an order to the
watchful porter with a twirl of one jackdaw-eye:

"For a couple of thalers," he displayed the coin, "a box of smokable
cigars may be purchased in Berlin."  He added, having cast for a
bite, and missing the rise: "Four thalers secures a really excellent
article!"

"Certainly," agreed P. C. Breagh.

"But for ten thalers," continued the old gentleman with forced
enthusiasm, coaxingly beckoning P. C. Breagh to approach nearer, "one
may smoke the choicest Havana brands.  Give me the medal, fortunate
young man, and take the money.  Such a sum is not often picked up in
the street!"

Said the young man, thus adjured, thrusting out his square chin
obstinately:

"If His Excellency consents to receive me, I will personally return
the medal to him.  Be good enough to let him know as much."

"Unhappy young man! you realize not the greatness of your own
presumption!" expostulated the old gentleman, lifting up his warty
eyelids and puffing out his whiskered cheeks over his old-fashioned
black satin stock.  "Is the Chancellor of the Realm to be--and at a
national crisis such as this?--at the beck and call of every English
traveler?"  He added with warmth: "For I know you to be of that
nation, young man, though you speak German with some approach to
facility.  Hence!  Trouble here no more, but give me that medal
before you take your departure.  Otherwise you will be forcibly
relieved of it by the hands of those who are accustomed to deal with
bumptious and obstinately-authority-defying persons of your
description...."

He added, as the arms of P. C. Breagh were pinioned in an iron grip
that clamped the elbows together behind the shoulder-blades, drew his
arms down, and pinioned his wrists: "He, he, he!  That was a capital
stratagem of yours, my excellent Niederstedt!  Really very smartly
done!"

The grim, sable-clad porter, in whose huge hands P. C. Breagh vainly
struggled, relaxed into a smile at the compliment.  He said, as from
different points two stalwart liveried attendants appeared, hastening
to lend assistance:

"One has not served in the Prussian Guards for nothing.  Once a
soldier, always a soldier!  Will the highly well-born Herr
Legation-Councillor order Grams and Engelberg to hold this English
pig-dog while I take His Excellency's medal out of the fellow's
clothes?"

Snarled P. C. Breagh, livid with rage and glaring at the hostile
faces like a young male tiger-cat:

"Add robbery to violence if you think well!--you are four to one--and
in your own country.  But as an English journalist I protest against
the outrage....  And the British Ambassador shall take the matter up!"

There was an instant's pause of indecision, during which P. C. Breagh
heard the opening of a door on the landing above.  Then, with the
rustle of silk, and the soft fall of footsteps traversing heavy
carpets, a resonant voice called down the stair that led up between
the basalt Sphinxes:

"Meanwhile, you will allow me to apologize for the too-excessive zeal
of my servants.  Do me the favor to come up here!"

The grip of the giant porter became flaccid as an infant's.  The
voice spoke again from the summit of the stair:

"Herr Legation-Councillor, will you kindly see Madame to her
carriage?  Au revoir, Madame, et bon voyage!"

A liquid voice responded:

"_Au revoir, Monseigneur_!  At Paris--who knows!--before the Noël!"

She pulled down her veil, curtsied with demure elegance, and came
softly rustling down in pale-hued, trailing silks and laces, one
snow-white hand blazing with splendid emeralds lightly passing over
the bronze baluster-rail, the other holding the ivory and jeweled
stick of a dainty parasol.

"Madame!"

As by an afterthought he had called her.  Midway in her descent the
lady turned to look up at him.  He said, bending his powerful eyes
upon the face of sensuous loveliness:

"Pardon! but I believe--you are a native of France?"

The hint stung.  She returned, with the stain of an angry blush
darkening the roses purchased from Rimmel; and a hard line showing
from the angle of each delicate nostril to the corner of the
deep-cut, scarlet lips:

"Monseigneur is correct ... I am a Frenchwoman....  But the heart is
free to choose its own country....  And--mine has learned to beat for
the Fatherland!..."

So exquisite was the cadence with which the words were uttered, that
P. C. Breagh heaved an involuntary sigh.  The Legation-Councillor
took snuff--it may have been his way of showing emotion.  The huge
porter sighed like a locomotive blowing off steam.  His colleagues,
who, like himself, stood waiting in rigid military attitudes,
suffered no sympathy to appear in their wooden faces, yet may have
felt the more.  But the heavy mask of their master was divested of
all expression.

"Even," said he, in his clear, resonant voice, "to the point of
outdoing Agamemnon, King of Argos.  For he--but doubtless you are
familiar with the classic story!--merely sacrificed Iphigeneia on the
altar of the virginal Artemis...."  He added with a tone of
intolerable irony: "It would have required fewer scruples and more
toughness than Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only
daughter to Venus Libertina....  Only a woman of fashion would be
capable of such infamy....  Pardon! but you have dropped your
parasol!"

She had shuddered and winced as though his words had been
vitriol,--dropped from above--corroding her delicate flesh....  The
costly toy had fallen from her hand as the shudder had passed over
her, and rolled down the stair, as she continued her descent.  P. C.
Breagh picked it up and handed it to her, as she set foot upon the
lowest step of the staircase.  She looked at him, and bent her head.
And the beauty that had been hers a moment back was so strangely,
bleakly altered, he could scarcely repress an exclamation of dismay.

Thus Circe might have stared, thought P. C. Breagh, when her feeding
hogs leaped up as men frantic for vengeance.  Thus Duessa, when the
spotted image of her own vileness was reflected in the glassy shield
of Truth.

The change in the boy's face stabbed Madame to consciousness.  She
caught at her mauve tulle veil, forgetful that it was already
lowered, and tore it horizontally, so that her full white rounded
chin emerged with fantastic effect, like the moon through a bank of
storm-wrack.  And then, with her head held high, she swept through
the vestibule in a frou-frou of silks and a gale of perfume, and down
the passage ending in the hall-door with the funereal knocker.  The
Legation-Councillor trotted after her.  One of the servants followed
him, and P. C. Breagh, mounting the staircase between the Sphinxes,
reached the landing and the summit of his ambitions in a breath.

"Time is scarce!" said the man who was meant when Prime Ministers and
political leader-writers referred to Prussia.  "I have no more than
five minutes to spare, but you shall have them.  Come this way!  So
you are an English journalist!  What paper do you represent, here in
Berlin?  Sit down and tell me in as few words as possible!"

They were in a small but lofty room on the first-floor, hung with
green flock paper.  It had a fireplace as well as a stove, and it was
a study, yet it contained no bookcases, only a couple of shelved
stands laden with pamphlets and papers of the official kind.  The two
high windows--open and unblinded, though the green-shaded
reading-lamp upon the big carved mahogany writing-table was
alight--looked across the extensive gardens reaching to the
Königgratzer-Strasse.  Beyond lay the Thiergarten, all black with
masses of people under the sultry red-gold sunset of middle July.

Perhaps you can see--like Scaramouch and the Sultan in the Eastern
story--P. C. Breagh, hot and dusty, flushed and rumpled, seated
opposite the most formidable personage of the day.  He who dictated
to Kings and carried his Foreign Office trailing after him whenever
he chose to go campaigning, stood upon the skin of a white lioness
that served as hearthrug, and bit off the end of a huge cigar.  He
looked bulkier than ever, and the powerful modeling of his
scant-haired temples, the splendid dome of the skull that housed the
keenest intellect in Europe, the masterful regard of the great eyes,
the sarcastic humor of the mouth shaded by the heavy mustache--traits
and features reproduced so constantly in the illustrated newspapers
of the period,--conveyed to Carolan the impression that a portrait
moved and spoke.

He was attired, as usually represented, in a dark blue, braided
military undress-frock, and trousers tightly strapped over boots with
cavalry spurs.  An Order hung at his collar.  As he threw back his
head in the act of lighting his cigar, P. C. Breagh recognized
it--the Cross of a Commander of the Red Eagle.  While on the left
breast of the blue frock-coat was a small three-cornered rent in the
cloth from which the lost medal had been somehow wrenched away....

The sight of that tear in the dark blue-faced cloth sent the blood
racing to P. C. Breagh's forehead.  He knew himself for a
presumptuous young man.  He plunged his hand into the pocket of the
brown Norfolk jacket, and brought out the red-and-white enameled
decoration, and said, awkwardly laying it upon the edge of the big
writing-table, in the yellow radius thrown by the lighted lamp:

"I found this after Your Excellency had gone!"

"Hand it here!" said the heavy blue eyes imperiously.  P. C. Breagh
got up and obeyed.  The Chancellor's long arm shot out, and the
muscular white fingers whipped the medal from the palm that offered
it.  Its owner assured himself by a brief scrutiny that the token had
sustained no injury, nodded, and re-pinned it on the breast of his
frogged military frock-coat.  When this was accomplished,--the small
solution in the continuity of the cloth being covered by the
decoration,--he said, taking the cigar from his mouth, and knocking
off the long crisp ash upon the edge of the white earthenware stove:

"I should have been sorry to have lost that.  But, while thanking you
for having restored it, let me say that had my servants taken it from
you by _force majeure_ they would not have been robbing you,--though
in law they might have been held guilty of a personal assault.  Now
as to your business.  You have had one of your five minutes!  You
have just now said you are an English journalist.  Does your business
concern the War?"

P. C. Breagh stammered--for the heavy eyes that rested on him seemed
to oppress him physically:

"To be frank with Your Excellency, I represent no newspaper.  I have
some slight experience as a journalist, that is all,--War
Correspondence seems to me the highest branch of journalism,--and I
want, naturally, to fit myself to practice it.  Therefore, as no
newspaper would employ me, I accepted a private commission given, out
of good-nature, by a friend, who has helped me before.  And--my first
day in Berlin--I fell in with Your Excellency.  I won't deny it
seemed a hopeful augury!"

"For the future! ... I understand!" said the Chancellor, sending out
a long cloud of cigar-smoke.  "And in what way do you suggest that I
should help you?"


He put the question so bluntly that P. C. Breagh, in the effort to
answer, floundered and boggled.  He had suddenly realized his own
insect-like insignificance in the eyes that were so intolerably heavy
in their regard.  His own eyes sank to the neat, small, polished
boots of the big man.  who stood smoking upon the white lioness-skin.
To the wearer of those boots he was merely a beetle who could be
crushed by them.  The slight ironical smile that altered the curve of
the mustache said as much.  But the Minister's tone was suave as he
went on:

"I think I have grasped the mainspring of your reasoning.  To begin
with, you desire to accompany one of our armies on the campaign?"

"Yes--sir!  Your Excellency, I should say!"

A lambent light of humor danced in the blue eyes that were bent on
him.  The faint ironic smile broadened into a laugh.  The Chancellor
took his cigar from his mouth, knocked off the ash, and said quite
pleasantly:

"And deducting from this premise, I conjecture that--because I have
been privileged to save you from being trampled to death under the
feet of the mob upon the Linden, you naturally take it for granted
that I would further your ambitions.  Gratitude, one of your English
authors has admirably defined as a lively sense of favors to come...."

P. C. Breagh, who had been for some time shrinking in his own
estimation, suddenly saw himself in a newer, meaner light.  His
torturer went on in mellifluous English:

"I do not know that any classical German author has defined gratitude
quite so cleverly.  But we in Pomerania have a folk-story which may
be new to you."  He drew sharply at his cigar, then laid it glowing
on the edge of the stove:

"You speak German quite passably, so I will tell it in our Pomeranian
dialect.  If this is not done, the dialogue lacks salt.  Thus it
goes: Wedig Knips, a peasant of Dalow, whose horses wanted watering,
went one winter's day to break the ice that covered the
drinking-hole....  'Bless us! what have we here?' says he, when he
finds a kerl called Peders, frozen in the ice, with his head down and
his heels up.  To make a long story short, he chops out Peders, takes
him home, and sets him up to thaw before the fire....  'Now,
neighbor,' says he, 'go about your business!'--'How can I when my
jerkin is wet and my breeches are full of muddy water?'--Says Wedig:
'Poor devil!  I will give you my Sunday trows!'--'And a jerkin too,
for you saved my life, you must remember!' ...  Wedig scratches his
head, but hands over a jerkin with the rest.  'Come, now be off!'
says he.  '"Off," with my under-pants and shirt all sopping!  Do you
want to kill me--now that you have saved my life?'--So Wedig pulls a
wry face, but hands over the underclothes....  'Put these on and be
off, we are busy people in this house!'  'What,' says Peders,
'without paying me the value of the good duds spoiled in your
stinking horsepond?'--'Must I pay?' ... 'Certainly, you have saved my
life!  Nobody asked you!--I had thrown myself in because I was tired
of living.  Now it is your bounden duty to make things tolerable for
me!'--'How make things tolerable?'--'To begin with, I want a cottage
to live in, and a plot of kail-ground to it, and a wee pickle
furniture.'--'But I have only this cottage, and the bits of sticks
you see!'--'Well, give me them!  Didn't you save my life?' ... Wedig
gets confused, sees no way out of it.  'The devil!' says he, 'this is
a nice affair!  However, take them, man!'--'I will take them,' says
Peders, 'but you must give me the cart and plow, the cow and the two
horses?'--'_Himmelkreuzbombenelement_!  Have I got to give you all
that because I saved your life?'--'Ay, undoubtedly!--and you must let
me have your wife into the bargain.  It's your bounden duty----'  'I
know! because I saved your life!  Shan't make such a mistake next
time, you may be sure of that!'--'No, but you did, so to grumble is
no use.'--'Thunder! my old girl will make a terrible
squawking.'--'Not when you have explained how you saved my life!' ...
Wedig scratches his head, rubs his chin, gets a bright idea....
'Help me to explain to the wife, do you agree?'--'Ay, of course!
What is it you want me to say to her?'--'Oh! say nothing.  Only let
me show her exactly how I got you out of the
water-hole.'--'Willingly!'--'But to do that I must put you back just
a minute!'--'Put me back?'--'Only for a minute.'  'Promise when I cry
"_Genug!_" you'll take me out directly!'--'All right!  Come along!'
So Wedig takes Peders by the legs and sticks him back where he found
him, driving his head well down into the mud at the bottom of the
pond....  So--he never cried '_Genug!_' and Wedig left him there....

The hard blue eyes that had been all alight with laughter, the
heavily molded face that had unexpectedly proved itself capable of
comic changes, the voice that, as the droll dialogue proceeded, had
conveyed with slight, admirably restrained mimicry the complacent
assurance of the knave and the dull bewilderment of the victim,
changed, became the Minister's again.  He said, in his smoothest
tones:

"I cannot put you back into the crush of the crowd, because by an
appeal to its loyal feelings and domestic instincts I was so
fortunate as to disperse it.  What I might do, of course, is to
deliver you to the tender mercies of my servants, to whom,--when you
brought back the medal,--you blustered about delivering it to me
personally.  This not-exactly-very-clever ruse would have failed--had
I not happened to step upon the scene.  Your English policy is often
more fortunate than masterly....  Fortune certainly has favored you
to-day.  Not in the fulfillment of your ambition to accompany a
Prussian Army to the field of action--that is a wish impossible to
gratify.  For we put up a general defense against the presence of any
save the most highly accredited Correspondents, and the War Minister
will only grant Legitimations to two or three.  But in obtaining for
an obscure paragraphist a special interview with the Prussian
Minister for Foreign Affairs on the eve of a world-crisis, Fortune
has certainly favored you.  Go back now to your hotel and write your
article; then telegraph to Fleet Street and make your own terms!"

"I'll be shot if I do!" choked out P. C. Breagh, flaming scarlet to
his hair-roots.  "And I thank Your Excellency for a lesson, and I beg
to take my leave!"

"Why does he go?  Why does he talk about a lesson?" asked the broad,
cynical gaze that rested on him.

As though he had spoken aloud, P. C. Breagh answered:

"Because I set my personal advantage above common gratitude and
honor.  Your Excellency lost the medal in pulling me out of the
scrimmage at the risk of your own life, and when I found the thing--I
used it,--exactly as you say!  True, you'd snubbed me when I'd tried
to thank you! yet I did believe your having saved me might help me in
some way....  But it would be better to cadge in the dustbins for a
living, than make money out of information gained by trickery.  And I
apologize sincerely for having been such a cad!"

"'Cad' is the slang for vulgarian, is it not?"  He added: "Yes, they
inculcate a code of honor at the English public schools."

The voice grated.  P. C. Breagh hated its owner.  But he answered,
looking squarely in the bulldog face that bent on him:

"They do, and I am sorry to have broken at least one of its articles.
May I wish Your Excellency good afternoon!"

The speaker bowed, not clumsily, and turned to quit the room, when a
ferocious growl behind him, and the scraping of heavy claws on
slippery parquet pulled round his head.  Savage, red-rimmed eyes
challenged, and the bared gleaming fangs of a huge boarhound couched
at length under a wrought-iron sofa at the west end of the longish
room menaced the stranger's throat:

"Down, Tyras!" ordered the Minister harshly, and with a deep groan
the heavy brute dropped its nose between its forepaws, and lay still,
shaken by occasional rumbling growls.

"You see," said the Minister, laughing, "that I can afford to
dispense with the services of detectives when this good servant is at
hand.  Come, sit down another moment....  I am really willing to help
you....  You have not come so badly as you imagine out of the affair!"

"But I have said I will not write the article, and I am intruding on
Your Excellency's privacy."  The soul of P. C. Breagh yearned for the
freedom of the streets.  To be shut up in the study of the greatest
of living Ministers,--set beak-to-beak with the man who was occupying
the attention of Europe--the master-mind in statecraft, who used
blunt truth as a weapon to beat down diplomatic falsehood, and
comported himself amidst the striving parties of his national
Parliament as a giant surrounded by dwarfs;--had seemed, previously,
a thing to boast of--a dazzling feather in the cap of achievement.
Now it was no triumph, but a torture.  He writhed under those keen,
amused, analytical glances, knowing himself worthy to be so despised.

"I have twenty minutes in which to refresh and rest, not having eaten
or sat down since ten o'clock this morning.  You have had ten--I will
give you another five.  Sit down again there!"

Tyras emitted another savage growl as though in support of his
owner's authority, and P. C. Breagh, loathing his host even more
intensely than he hated P. C. Breagh, obeyed the imperious hand that
pointed to the chair he had vacated, and sat down, white-gilled now,
and sick with longing to be out of this presence into which he had
thrust himself--beyond the reach of the icy, contemptuous tones and
the arrogant, domineering eyes.


The Chancellor had turned away to pull at one of the red woolen
bell-ropes that hung on either side of the fire-place, shabby things,
threadbare with use, like the Persian carpet that was trodden out in
paths by the spurred feet of the man who stood for Prussia; worn like
the leather cushions of the great wrought-iron sofa, under which the
great man's faithful attendant couched, with one eye on the familiar
face, and the other on the strange one that might mask an enemy.

Above the sofa, beneath a trophy of fencing-swords and masks,
reigning over a rack supporting a number of red and white military
undress-caps in all stages of wear, and another containing a
collection of pipe-sticks and unmounted pipe-heads, hung the
half-length oil-portrait of a beautiful girl in ball-dress.  Below
was a large-framed photograph of a noble-looking woman, with a mass
of black braided hair framing a long, serious face, with grave dark
eyes, thick straight nose, and full-curved, humorous lips recalling
published engravings of the English author of "Adam Bede."  Probably
it was the Countess--that same Fräulein Johanna Puttkammer who had
been hugged under the gaze of her assembled family.  She looked
strong, serene and courageous, fit--thought P. C. Breagh--to be the
wife of a man destined by Fate and framed by nature to become a
leader of men.  Also, she looked like a woman who could love with
old-world, elemental, forceful passion.  She had bestowed such love
upon this man--who had begun life as a roaring, hard-drinking young
Pomeranian squire, well worthy of the sobriquet of "Mad Bismarck,"
bestowed upon him by his native county.

She had sifted the gold out of the sand....  She had never openly
displayed her influence....  All the same it had been there, guiding,
sustaining, controlling....  He had written to her, years after, when
he had begun in earnest to be a power in politics....  "_You see what
you have made me!  What should I have done without you?_"

Arrogant, harsh, domineering, merciless, as his enemies had reason to
term him, there must be something noble in the man who had written
like that.  He was said to be a kind, if not over-indulgent, father
to his two big sons, even then serving as private soldiers in a
well-known regiment of Dragoon Guards, and to be worshiped by his
daughter, a feminine copy of himself, if that oil-portrait were
anything like....

"Have you taken any food to-day?..."

The interrogation brought P. C. Breagh's head round.  A servant must
have appeared, and gone, and come again in answer to the
bell-summons.  For on a clear corner of an étagère otherwise piled
with official papers and pamphlets, stood a tray, bearing glasses and
a vast crystal jug of creaming golden-hued nectar with miniature
icebergs floating on the surface; and several dishes of rolls, split,
profusely buttered, and lined with something savory, the sight and
scent of which awoke tender yearnings within....

"No!--I thought not.  Drink this and eat some of these sandwiches.  I
myself have fasted longer than is agreeable!"

And a huge goblet of the ice-cold creaming nectar was handed to P. C.
Breagh, who immediately realized that his tongue and palate were dry
as the sun-baked asphalt of the Linden.

"_Prosit!_" said his host, and drained his glass, adding, as the
guest duly responded according to the classic formula and drank: "You
are University-bred, I see!  What Alma Mater had the preference?
Schwärz-Brettingen! ... Ah, they thought very badly of me there about
the time of the Luxembourg Garrison Question.  Nearly all the little
foxes barked at me as I passed through.  However, we are now
reconciled, and more than a thousand of the students have applied to
serve as volunteers in this war,--there's an item of interest for
your paper!--though you have Quixotically determined, you say, not to
make use of any information that I may be enabled to offer you.  All
Quixotism is weakness, in my estimation; a man, according to my code,
should pursue his advantage where he finds it irrespective of ethical
laws or religious prejudice.  Now eat some of these stuffed rolls.
Here are caviar, smoked goose-breast, Westphalian ham and
liver-sausage.  You see I set you an example!--and a would-be
campaigner should be able to sleep soundly under any and all
conditions; and eat whenever anything eatable is obtainable, with
unflinching appetite!"

The savory rolls were vanishing under the speaker's repeated attacks,
and the golden tide in the great crystal decanter was sinking
visibly.  He said, lifting and holding it so that between the light
of the green-shaded table-lamp and the red glow of sunset pouring
through the unblinded western windows, the liquid in it shone ruby
and emerald....

"Come, let me fill your glass again, and then I shall send you about
your business.  Absolved, you understand, from that ridiculous vow of
yours--and with a magic talisman to enable you to use your eyes."

The steady hand set down the now emptied jug, and took from the red
marble mantelshelf a small and perfectly-finished pair of
field-glasses, covered in black Russia leather and mounted in ivory.
An inlaid silver shield bore a monogram, "O. v. B.-S.," and a date.

"You can shoot with a pistol?--Good!--then I should advise you to buy
one, if possible.  A revolver of the American Colt's
invention--six-barreled--a feature which increases weight in
proportion as it adds to effectiveness--would be useful.  Indeed, I
carry one myself!  One day they will turn out such things with one
barrel--but we must wait for that, I am afraid.  Here is the case
belonging to the glasses, with a strap to sling it round your
shoulders--and one thing more I will give you--though I am less
certain about its ultimate usefulness!"

The writing-table stood in the middle of the room.  He moved to it
with one of his long, heavy strides, sat down--dipped quill in
ink--and penned a few lines rapidly, glancing at the sunburned,
freckled face as though to refresh his memory--holding up an
imperious baud for silence when the recipient of the field-glasses
seemed about to protest against the value of the gift.

"Your nationality?--'British.'  Name, 'Patrick Carolan
Breagh--pronounced "Brack."  Your height?--Be very accurate.  One
half-inch too much or too little might bring you into trouble of a
serious kind.  'Five feet nine' ... you promise to be taller.  Your
age ... twenty-three last January....  Shoulders broad, good muscular
development.  Your hair ... Reddish, is it not? ... You have gray
eyes with what the French would call _taches_ of yellow in them.
Complexion fresh, considerably freckled.  Nose short and straight,
ears small, teeth white and regular.  Chin square and with a
cleft--weaklings have not such chins!..."

He added a brief sentence to the hastily scrawled description, signed
and blotted it, rose and came to P. C. Breagh and thrust it in his
hand.

"Do not thank me!  It is my passing whim to help you--regard it in
that light.  As to this pass, safe-conduct or whatever one may call
it--it may forward you or hinder you....  _Potztausend_!  I am a mere
officer of Cuirassiers of the _Landwehr_--General by courtesy--not
Generalissimo! ... You, Bucher! ... What is there wanted now?..."

For a scratch on the door-panel had been succeeded by the flurried
entrance of the little Councillor of Legation, breathing hard, and
red in the face.  He gabbled in Spanish:

"Pardon, Your Excellency, that I enter without knocking.  But His
Highness the Crown Prince is coming upstairs!..."

And almost in the same instant, as Tyras uttered a deep "wuff" of
friendly greeting, the open doorway was filled by the stateliest and
most martial figure in Europe, and a pleasant, manly voice said:

"Not finding you in your official quarters below-stairs, I ventured,
my dear Count Bismarck, to follow you to your private study.  It is a
question of whether Le Sourd delivered the war-gauntlet from Paris,
or----  Pardon!  I had no idea that you were not alone!"

The tall, broad-chested, golden-bearded Viking in the undress uniform
of the First Regiment of Guards touched his cap in acknowledgment of
P. C. Breagh's respectful salutation.  Then, as in obedience to a
glance from the Minister, the lean claws of the little Councillor
closed upon P. C. Breagh's arm, and he was plucked from the room, the
Prince asked, glancing after the queer couple:

"May one ask who your young friend is?" and got answer:

"It is only an English schoolboy, Your Royal Highness,--who thirsts
to try his hand at War-correspondence--having had a few articles
printed in some London rag.  And this being so, he applies to me, who
am the least leisured person in His Majesty's dominions---for a
moment of my spare time!..."

"It is annoying, my dear Count," answered the mellow-voiced Viking,
"but cannot your people keep such troublesome persons outside?"

The Minister returned, laughing:

"He caught me on my doorstep,--as the polecat waylaid the
badger!--and as he brought back a decoration I had lost, and which
he, luckily for himself, had found!--I could not refuse him a
minute's interview.  But with regard to Your Royal Highness's
question of an instant since--Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires,
placed the Emperor's declaration of war in my hands about an hour
after the opening of Council in the Palace to-day."

Said the Prince:

"Unhappy man! driven to risk the loss of an Empire that he may
continue to rule a nation of enemies.  One can hardly doubt the
issue--yet at what cost of lives shall we not purchase victory!"

Bismarck said in harsh, metallic tones, bending his brows upon the
Prince, who all the world knew loved peace, and loathed the thought
of the red months of strife that were approaching:

"Your Royal Highness is aware that I look upon this war as necessary,
and that I should not have returned to Varzin without giving in my
resignation to His Majesty had the issue been other than what it
is....  As for this weak-backed Napoleon, this Pierrot stuffed with
bran,--who is kept in an upright attitude only by the slaps I deal
him on one cheek and the buffets the Monarchists and the
Revolutionists lend him on the other!--it will be better for him to
meet his end by a bullet or a sword-thrust on the banks of the Rhine,
than to be blown to pieces by some bomb in the streets of Paris, or
to die of apoplexy in the bedroom of some nymph of the
theater-coulisses!"

He drew himself to his full height and, folding his powerful arms
upon his breast, said, looking full at the Prince, who had declined a
seat and who was standing near the window, his hair and beard glowing
golden-red in the full rays of the setting sun:

"Your Royal Highness speaks of the effusion of blood.  I am of those
who have drawn the sword in the service of their King and country.  I
do not regard war from the point of view of the man who stops at
home.  More than this! ... His Majesty is not the only father who has
a son serving in our Army....  I have two.  Herbert and Bill...."

A pale purplish tint suffused his heavy face and crept to the summit
of his rugged forehead.  His fierce blue eyes dimmed.  He said, in
slightly muffled tones:

"I am not given to pompous phrases.  Yet if German unity can only be
brought about by a great national war waged against our near-hand
enemy--our old, cunning, sleepless foe--I hail that war, even though
it leave me without posterity!  If the gulf that divides the Northern
and Southern sections of the Fatherland can be better bridged by my
boys' dead bodies ... I would give them as freely as I would give my
own!"

A spasm twisted his under-jaw.  He said, laughing in his stern way:

"Three long-legged Bismarcks should equal one eighteen-foot-seven
plank.  And I speak not only for myself.  My wife would echo me."

Said the Prince in his cordial way:

"My mother has a great admiration for Her Excellency.  My wife, too,
speaks of her as a woman of antique nobility of mind."  He continued,
with a smile that curved the bold, frank mouth under the glittering
mustache into lines of exceeding pleasantness: "And her personal
solicitude for Your Excellency pleases my father much!"

The heavy face that opposed him lost its dogged, set expression.  The
Minister broke into a hearty laugh.

"So!  I have been waiting to hear somewhat of that voluble telegram
of hers to Abeken: '_Pray ask the King not to bother Count Bismarck
about State matters just now, when he is taking Carlsbad waters for
the gout!_'

"Ha, ha!"  The Prince joined gaily in the laughter.  "The Councillor
was working with the King and myself, when he received that wire.  It
came with a sheaf of others--he read it aloud without a change of
expression.....  Then you should have seen his face ... a study for a
comedian...."

The Minister said, still smiling:

"My wife pours many confidences of the domestic sort into Abeken's
bosom.  She said to him during the Constitutional Conflict of '66 ...
'Bismarck cares really nothing at all about these stupid political
matters.  A cabbage well grown, or a fir-tree well planted, means
more to him than the Indemnity Bill.'  Yet when the Bill passed she
was all-triumphant.  And to-day she remarked to me: 'War is horrible
to me on principle.  But it would be equally horrible to me if you
said to me to-morrow: "_All is over!--we do not fight!..._"'  I made
her angry by telling her that one might parody in application to the
mental attitude of her sex the lines of the English Poet Laureate,
and say:

  "Her reason rooted in unreason stood."


"When our German women become too highly educated," said the
fair-haired giant, "love will take wing for a land where the culture
of the feminine intellect is still unpopular.  We males hold our
supremacy on the very insecure tenure of a carefully inculcated
belief that, being men, we must be wise!"

Said the Minister:

"There is a Pomeranian proverb bearing on that question.  '_In the
house where a strip of green hide hangs handy, the wife will never
know better than her old man!_'"

"Unless she happened to be the stronger of the two, bodily as well as
mentally, dear Count," the Prince rejoined; "in which case the
husband would be well advised to accept the inferior place.  For
against brute-strength and brains combined, there is no remedy but
patience."

Bismarck retorted:

"Possibly--but what if the muscular brute with the brains possesses a
share of patience also?  There is nothing like knowing how to wait--I
assure Your Royal Highness!"

The Prince looked at the great figure topped by the stolid bulldog
face, and recalled something that the English Princess, his wife, had
said to him that day:

"This fearful struggle will set the coping-stone upon that man's
colossal labors and ambitions!"

But he was all grave, gracious cordiality as they passed from the
lighter vein of talk to serious questions, though, as he took leave
of the Minister at the hall-door and stepped into his waiting
carriage, he said to himself mournfully:

"Alix was right.  He has what he has waited and schemed for.  To
light this international conflagration he would have ventured down to
fetch a burning brand from the nethermost Hell.  And what oceans of
blood will be poured out before the fire may be extinguished--none
knows but God alone!"




XXIX

Von Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, went home from the
Council-Extraordinary to his private quarters at the offices of the
Great General Staff.  He dispatched the three-word telegram, and the
vast machine began to work....

All had been ready for two years.  Nothing was left to finish at the
last moment.  Not a speck of rust marred shaft or spindle or bearing,
not a drop of oil was clogged in any slot.

Days back, the Heads of Departments had been recalled by a brief
telegram from the Chief who knew how to be taciturn in seven
languages.  Now, while in Berlin, as in every other city and town of
Prussia Proper and her Eleven Provinces, palaces, mansions,
restaurants and _cafés_, beer-gardens and schnaps-cellars blazed with
gas and resounded with the clinking of glasses, and people sat late
into the grilling July night discussing and rediscussing that special
supplement of the _North German Gazette_--which was being distributed
gratuitously by hundreds of thousands,--predicting the next move of
the Man of Iron, and the latest ruse of the Man of Paris,--consuming
tons of sausage, caviar, pickled salmon, herrings in salad, and
potted tunny, with strawberries and other fruits and sweet dishes,
all washed down by floods of cooling beer, or iced Moselle and
champagne--the numberless huge barracks and other military
establishments displayed another kind of activity.

Here no outbursts of patriotic song and festivity checked the rapid,
organized, methodical scurry of warlike preparation.  Soldiers ran
about like busy ants, purposeful and unblundering.  Long trains of
Army Service carts and wagons streamed in at divers lofty gates, to
emerge at others after the briefest interval, heavily laden with Army
stores, Army baggage, War material of all kinds.  Night and day, huge
Government factories and foundries dithered and roared, filling up
newly made vacuums in those huge magazines and storehouses which must
always be kept full.  In the gloomy dominions of the Iron King, Herr
Krupp, that stout-loined Teuton who begat great guns instead of tall
sons, and had them godfathered by Prussian Royalty--what forests of
tall chimneys belched forth smoke, canopying begrimed and prosperous
Westphalian towns, populated by innumerable swarthy toilers in the
gigantic iron and steel foundries!  At Essen, where mountains of coal
kiss the sooty skies, and heavy locomotives ceaselessly grind over
networks of shining steel rails, dragging strings of trucks,
containing yet more fuel for the ever-hungry furnaces,--within an
impregnable rampart of solid masonry,--he dwelt in a Babylonian
palace.  The panting of innumerable steam-power engines, the banging,
moaning, crashing, groaning, and grinding of forges, lathes, and
planing-machines; cutting, shaping, boring, and polishing machines;
with the beating of sixty-two steam-hammers, of all weights up to
that of fifty tons, which cost £100,000 to manufacture, sounded like
a cannon whenever it was used, and was kept working without pause, so
as not to lose a fraction of the interest of the capital sunk in
it--made his concert by day, and by night served for his serenade and
lullaby.  He made laws for the control of his grimy subjects, this
Briareus of ten thousand hands--and enforced them by the aid of his
own police and magistrates.  With orders in course of execution for
Turkey, China, Egypt, Russia, and Spain, he was yet able to deliver
eighty cannon per week to the different artillery depots of his
Fatherland.  His steel, tempered by his secret process, the new ore
being brought him from his Spanish mines by his own fleet of
transports, surpassed even Bessemer's.  Yet he was not a conceited or
purse-proud man.  By the chief entrance of the biggest of all his
factories stood the little soot-blackened forge where forty years
before young Krupp had labored with his father and a couple of
workmen.  Small wonder the powerful Iron King had honor from his
over-lord.


Conceive next the well-ordered bustle at the headquarters of the
different Army Corps, when the withered finger of the Warlock pressed
upon the button, and the spark of electricity leaped along a thousand
wires, carrying with it the vitalizing word....  Moltke's methods
were then fire-new, and made the world sit up.


You might have seen the Reserve men of the Twelve Provinces--whose
summons for assembly lay ready in the Landwehr office of every city,
town, village, or hamlet--streaming in at the district depots,
bringing each Line regiment up to war-strength (nearly double its
numbers in time of peace).  Mobilization was no foreign word to them,
for once a year, after Schmidt, the field-laborer, had done getting
in the harvest, and when Schultz, the bank-clerk, and Kunz, the
chemist's assistant, had got their annual autumn holiday, Schmidt,
Schultz, and Kunz were accustomed to perform a series of carefully
rehearsed physical exercises ending in maneuvers, and a safe if
inglorious return to the domestic hearth.

Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz were only remarkable by their unlikeness
to each other--Schmidt being the brown, uncouth, and unshaven husband
of a stout wife and numerous tow-headed babes.  Schultz was more
recently married to a young lady remotely connected on the maternal
side with a family possessing the right to inscribe the aristocratic
prefix "von" before its surname.  The couple lived frugally on Herr
Schultz's salary of thirty pounds a year, somewhere upon the
outskirts of the select quarter of the country town (some four miles
distant from Schmidt's native village)--while Kunz, the graduate of a
University, and author of a text-book of Analytical Chemistry, sold
impartially to both, squills, rhubarb-tincture, and porous plasters
over the counter of his employer's shop.

Served by the Burgomaster's clerk, or a wooden-faced
orderly-corporal, with the compelling bit of paper, Schmidt, Schultz,
and Kunz, having taken farewell embraces of their nearest and
dearest, would sling over their shoulders canvas wallets containing a
lump of sausage, a shirt or so, a huge chunk of bread, white or
black, with a bottle containing wine or schnaps, and stowing next
their skins leather purses containing a few coins, and a parchment
volume resembling the English soldier's "small book," would hasten by
rail or road in the direction of their regimental rendezvous, toward
which bourne the Reserve contingent of other towns, villages, and
hamlets would also betake themselves, until the roads were blackened
with their tramping bodies and the trains would be packed chock-full.
Arrived at Headquarters, batch after batch,--subsequently to a brief
but exhaustive medical overhauling--would be dispatched to the
arsenal, where attaching themselves to a tremendous queue of other
Schmidts, Schultzes, and Kunzes, they would mark time in double-file
outside a vast, grim, barn-like structure, until the moment arrived
for entering; when with well-accustomed quickness, each would find
his way to a certain hook or group of hooks, surmounted with his
regimental number, from which depended a certain familiar uniform,
with accoutrements and weapons equally well known.

Picture innumerable alleys formed by these dangling uniforms,
radiating away to the point of distance,--and suppose Schmidt,
Schultz, and Kunz equipped in something answering to the twinkling of
a Teutonic eye.

In--supposing Schmidt, Schultz, or Kunz to belong to the Infantry--a
pair of dark gray unmentionables, red-corded down the side-seams, and
a pair of mid-leg-high boots, very roomy and strong.  Inside the
boots were no stockings, tallowed linen bands being bound about the
legs and feet.  A single-breasted tunic of dark blue cloth with red
facings followed, and a flat forage-cap of blue cloth with a red
band, or a glazed black leather helmet with a brazen Prussian eagle
front-plate and a brass spike-top.  With the addition of a zinc
label, slung round the neck, and bearing a man's name, number,
company, and regiment, an overcoat made into a sausage and tied
together at the ends, a canvas haversack, glass leather-covered
canteen, a pipeclayed waistbelt with two cartridge-boxes of black
leather, and a knapsack of calf-skin tanned with the hair, stretched
upon a wooden frame, and slung by two pipe-clayed straps hooked to
the waistbelt in front and then passing over the shoulders.  Two
shorter straps, going under the armpits, would be fastened to the
knapsack, which had a receptacle for a packet of twenty cartridges at
either end of it.  Within, suppose the usual soldier's kit, with
spoon, knife, fork, comb, and shaving-glass; and on top imagine a
galvanized iron pot, holding about three quarts, with a tight-fitting
cover which became, at need, a frying-pan.  Arm with a strong
waistbelt-sword about fifteen inches long, an unburnished needle-gun
heavily grease-coated, and Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz, having hung
their civilian garments on the hooks that erst supported the martial
panoply, tugged at a final buckle-strap, wheeled and passed out,
transformed, by yet another door.


Always the three had known that an hour would come when these
familiar exercises would not end with half-a-dozen exceedingly
strenuous field-days, and a return,--on the part of Schmidt and
Schultz,--to the arms of their respective wives.  Schmidt, on whose
breast shone the war-medal of '66, and who must now be addressed as
"Herr Sergeant" by his social superiors, seemed not to mind at all,
though he swore at his boots, quite unjustly, for pinching.  But the
bank-clerk's espousals were too recent, and his first experience of
paternity too near at hand, for any display of hardihood, while Herr
Kunz was but newly betrothed to the apothecary's daughter Mina, and
could not forget how the tears had rolled out of her large blue eyes
at the prospect of parting with her beloved Carl.

Therefore, although the mouths of the trio were, when not
professionally shut, busily engaged in bellowing "_Die Wacht am
Rhein_," "_Ich bin ein Preusse_," and other patriotic songs, or
sending up deafening "Hochs" for the King, the Crown Prince, Prince
Friedrich Karl, "Our Moltke," and another public personage recently
very much elevated in the popular esteem,--the mental visions of at
least two of them were occupied with prophetic visions in which
blue-eyed sweethearts pined and faded away out of grief for absent
betrotheds, and young wives wept over empty cradles until they too
expired, with faltering messages of love for the husband so far
distant on their dying lips....

"_Sapperlot_!  What in thunder are you gaping at, you _gimpel_, you?"
a rough, loud voice would shout, and a terrific thump from the hard
and heavy hand of Sergeant Schmidt would visit the shoulders of
Private Schultz, or Kunz.  Who thus addressed would jerk out:

"Oh, nothing, nothing, Herr Sergeant, truly nothing at all!" and
receive from their recently despised inferior the rude counsel to
look alive and keep cheery:

"For this will be a war worth fighting in, mark you!  The Man on the
Seine has played the part of the Evil Neighbor too long.  France and
Prussia have got to come to clapperclaws--there's no help for it!
The soup is cooked, so let us eat it.  He is the luckiest who gets
the spoon in first!"

You may suppose precisely similar scenes and dialogues occurring in
the experience of Kraus, Klaus, and Klein, who, having served their
time with the active Army and passed from the Reserve into the
_Landwehr_, were now fetched out with the First Call, not only to
replace the garrisons of Saxony, Prague, Pardubitz, and all the other
fortified points on the lines of communication, but to guard and
patrol those lines of road and railway over which the three marching
armies were to receive supplies of food, ammunition, clothing,
stores, and medicine; and maintain telegraphic communication with
Berlin.  Meanwhile Grein, Schwartz, and Braun, men of riper years,
stiffer joints, and older experiences, remained at home; waiting the
hour when, Death having thinned the ranks of the fighters in the
forefront of the battle, the Second Call should sound.  When these
hardy veteran battalions, formed into divisions of the same numerical
strength as those of the regular Army, would roll over the frontiers,
to fill up the bloody gaps left by the scythe of the Red Mower, and
play their part in the vast, chaotic, multi-tableauxed drama of War.

Prussia contributed some 652,294 actors of small parts to the said
drama, not counting the leading men, stars of the war-theater, who
supported the heavier roles.  And Bavaria, Würtemburg, and Baden
contributed their contingents, bringing up the strength of the cast
to 780,923 performers.  The equine actors numbered 213,159.


The vast machine worked wonderfully.  It is interesting to know that
the German Staff maps of France showed recently made roads which in
July, 1870, had not been marked upon any map issued by the Imperial
War Office at Paris, and that within three days from that three-word
signal-wire of Moltke's, military trains full of men, guns, horses,
ammunition, and proviant, began to run at the rate of forty per day,
from north, east, and south, toward the narrow frontier between
Strasbourg and Luxembourg.

"For God and Fatherland!" and "Watch well the Rhine!" said the
miniature banners carried by thousands of people.  You could see them
fluttering from crowded roofs and packed windows, and variegating the
sidewalks of thoroughfares below, as regiment after regiment marched
to the station, in shining rivers of _pickelhaubes_ and bayonets, or
Dragoon helmets, Hussar busbies, and Uhlan schapkas, flowing between
upheaped banks of waving women and cheering men.

Speedily, in response to communications addressed by the Crown Prince
to the South German sovereigns, notifying these potentates of his
appointment as Commander-in-Chief of their armies, came replies
expressing satisfaction of different shades and qualities.  The Grand
Duke of Baden's bubbled with joy, and expressed the determination of
his troops to gain their Royal Commander's confidence by fidelity and
bravery.  The King of Würtemburg rejoiced likewise, but in cooler
terms, "in our German affair" being brought to a head at last; and
was anxious to have the opportunity of saluting the heir of Prussia.
The King of Bavaria telegraphed "_Very happy.  Many thanks your Royal
Highness's attention!_"  A message which conveyed no more warmth than
was felt.

His telegram of martial support, addressed at the outset of affairs
to Onkel Wilhelm, had seemed quite genuine.  Had not Count Bismarck
quite a sheaf of documents, more or less compelling, signed in the
youthful monarch's scrawling hand?  King Ludwig had ordered immediate
mobilization of the dark green and light blue uniforms--expended
millions of gulden in variegated lamps, public fountains of white
beer and red wine, bands, Royal Command Opera performances, patriotic
set-pieces in fireworks (representing the tutelary genii of Prussia
and Bavaria, cuirassed and armed, upholding the standards of
black-and-white and blue-and-white), joined in the "_Wacht am Rhein_"
as though he liked the tune (which he abhorred), and certainly
enjoyed the tumultuous plaudits with which his subjects greeted their
monarch's first and last appearance in the character of a man of
action.

But instead of riding away at the head of the South German Army,
Nephew Ludwig sent an excuse to Onkel Wilhelm--one has heard a
gumboil named as occasion of the disability--and Cousin Fritz was
dispatched to take over chief command.

Prince Luitpold of Bavaria accompanied the First Army Headquarter
Staff.  Alas, the appointment but served to inflame the gumboil of
the jealous King,--the accounts that were daily to reach him of the
prowess of his martial cousin of Prussia worked like poison in his
blood.  He drew the hood of his mantle of dreams more closely over
his head to shut out those fanfares of triumph, those "Hochs!" and
cheerings, and plunged more deeply into the solitudes of his forests
and mountain-caves.  Blood and iron were his bugbears, and yet they
might have been his tonics too.  They might have staved off the black
hound of Destiny, already baying at his heels, and saved him from
vicious decadence, ultimate madness, and a strange and sordid end.

And yet, how did his chivalrous cousin die, at the meridian of robust
manhood, under the newly imposed weight of an Imperial Crown?  Not
the swift, soldierly death that is given by the bullet of a
chassepot--the projectile from a mitrailleuse--the flying fragment of
an exploding shrapnel-shell--but a straw-death, a bed-death such as
angry seers and cursing Valkyrs of Scandinavian legend foretold as
the speedy punishment of warriors who had broken faith and tarnished
by false oaths the brightness of their honor.

But no shadow of the grim fate that was to befall him darkened those
brave blue eyes at this period.  Laboring night and day at the
mobilization of his Third Army, in concert with his Chief of Staff,
Von Blumenthal, he was buoyantly happy, despite his hatred of the
shedding of blood and his undisguised compassion for the conjectured
plight of the Man on the Seine.

With whom Britannia at first expressed a sympathy not at all
restrained or guarded, and for the success of whose arms she was
openly eager, until, toward the close of this momentous month of
July, 1870, the text of a brief but pithy diplomatic document, penned
in precise and elegant French, and dated a few years previously--made
its appearance in the columns of the Times.

The movements of the opposing forces camped on the banks of the Meuse
and the Saar lost interest for the public eye in perusal of this
rough memorandum of a proposed treaty between the Third Napoleon and
the King of Prussia, scrawled in Count Benedetti's flowing Italian
hand.

Since the spring of '67 it had been hidden away in a snug corner of
Bismarck's dispatch-box, waiting to jump out.  You recall the terms
of the thing--one of many overt attempts to seize a coveted prize.
The Empire of France was to recognize the acquisitions made by
Prussia in the war of 1866 with Austria.  Prussia was to aid Napoleon
III. to buy from Holland the debatable Duchy of Luxembourg.  The
Emperor was to shed the luster of his smile and the _ægis_ of his
approval upon Federal Union between the North German Parliament and
the South German States--the separate sovereignty of each State
remaining.  In return, Prussia was to abet the Bonaparte in the
military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kingdom of
Belgium.  And in furtherance of these laudable ends, an alliance,
offensive and defensive, against any Power, insular or otherwise, was
to be compact between the great gilt eagle of the Third Empire and
the black-plumaged bird across the frontier.

Britons, with inconveniently good memories, perusing this draft,
recalled the existence of a treaty existing between France, England,
and Prussia, mutually binding these Powers to protect the neutrality
of Belgium, and drew reflections damaging to the betrayer and the
betrayed.  French diplomatists asserted that the project had been
drawn up by Benedetti at Bismarck's dictation.  Why preserve so
explosive a document, they argued, if it was never to be drawn out
and supplied with detonators in the shape of signatures?  Later on M.
Rouher's boxes of official papers, found at his château of Cercay,
gave up the original draft-treaty annotated in the Emperor's
handwriting.

For it was his nature, may God pardon him! to be false and specious,
ungrateful and an oath-breaker.  He must always repay great services
with great wrongs.  Thus in the red year 1870, England, who in '54
had poured out blood and treasure lavishly to aid him, receiving this
plain proof of treachery, stood sorrowfully back and saw him rush
upon his fate.  Sick and desperate, madly hurling his magnificent
Army hither and thither upon the arena, a Generalissimo out-generaled
before the War was a week old.

He had made France his mistress and his slave, and now her fetters
were to be hacked apart by the merciless sword of the invader.
Through losses, privations, and humiliations; through an ordeal of
suffering unparalleled in the world's history; through an orgy of
vice and an era of infidelity; through fresh oceans of blood shed
from the veins of her bravest; she was to pass before she found
herself and GOD again.

Meanwhile, North, East, South and West, prevailed a great swarming
scurry of military preparation, the tunes of the "_Wacht am Rhein_"
and "_Heil dir im Siegeskranz_" clashing with "_Partant pour la
Syrie_" and the "_Marseillaise_"; and the solemn strains of masses
rising up together with Lutheran litanies, as two great nations
strove to convince Divine Omnipotence that Codlin deserved to whip,
and not Short.

Strange! that Christian men, who frankly confess themselves to be
sinners, worms, and dust-grains before the supreme Majesty of the
Creator, should be so prone to offer Him advice.




XXX

The lovely lady whose lace parasol P. C. Breagh had picked up at the
bottom of the Prussian Chancellor's staircase was driven, by the
tipsy-faced Jehu of a debilitated hack-cab, to a semi-fashionable
hotel situated in a graveled courtyard facing toward the Linden.  The
bureau-manager looked out of his glass-case as she swept her rustling
draperies over the dusty Brussels carpets of the vestibule, and
muttered to the pale-faced ledger-clerk at his side:

"A representative from the firm of Müller and Stettig,
Charlotten-Strasse, has called three times to see the lady in Suite
35.  With a jewelry account for payment, promised and deferred."

The clerk assented with a nod of the double-barreled order, and
reaching an envelope from a numbered pigeon-hole offered it for the
inspection of his superior.

"Baroness von Valverden," sniffed the bureau-manager, and in his turn
reached a squat red Almanach de Gotha from the top of a pile of
ledgers, and ruffled the leaves with an industrious thumb.

"It is as I thought--there is no Baroness von Valverden.  Baron Ernst
von Schön-Valverden is a minor and a bachelor, private in the --th
Regiment of Potsdam Infantry of the Guard.  This must be the
Frenchwoman I have heard of as mixed up in the scandal connected with
the death of Baron Maximilian at Schönfeld in the Altenwald some
years ago.  He left Madame a lapful of thalers--I suppose she has
played skat with the money.  Not that that matters if the hook-nosed,
long-haired Slav she has got with her upstairs has the cash to settle
with us!  But if not----"

The manager's tone was ominous.  The clerk scratched his nose with
the feather-end of his pen, and said admiringly:

"If not, the Herr Bureau-Director will give orders to detain their
valises and trunks?"

The bureau-manager smiled, and said, jerking his chin at another
envelope reposing in the numbered pigeon-hole:

"Send that up at once and let them know we will stand no nonsense.
Keep Müller and Stettig's back for the present.  Understand?"

And the clerk nodded again, and whistled down a tube, and evoked from
regions below a brass-buttoned, gilt-braided functionary, to whom he
entrusted the missive indicated, which bore the monogram of the
hotel-company, and indeed contained their bill.

It was handed to Madame by the brass-buttoned functionary just as she
reached the ante-room of her second-floor suite of apartments.  She
took it from the salver, and said without looking at it:

"Presently!"

The functionary gave a peremptory verbal message.  She repeated:

"Presently, sir, presently....  At this moment I am exceedingly
fatigued!"

The brass-buttoned functionary begged to remind the gracious lady of
similar excuses previously received by the management.  At this she
turned upon him the battery of her magnificent eyes.  Always
economical of her forces, she had removed her torn tulle veil during
the cab-drive, and with a delicate powder-puff drawn from a jeweled
case dependant from her golden _châtelaine_, removed from her lovely
face all traces of emotion.  Only a spiteful woman would have called
her thirty-five....  And the functionary was a man, despite his brass
buttons and gilt braiding.  When she smiled, he caved in, bowed, and
left her.  But he did not forget to leave the bill.

She had it in her hand as she entered the drawing-room of the suite
of apartments, one of those impossibly shaped,
fantastically-uncomfortable salons, possessing a multiplicity of
doors and windows, upholstered with rose-satin and crusted with
ormolu, such as are only seen in foreign hotels and upon the stage.
Despite the sultry heat of the July weather the windows were shut,
their Venetian blinds lowered, and their thick lace curtains drawn
over these.  And in a rose-colored arm-chair with twisted golden legs
and arms and an absurd back-ornament like an Apollonian lyre, huddled
a dark, hawk-featured, powerfully built man of something less than
forty, wrapped in a short, wide coat lined, cuffed, and collared with
black Astrakhan; wearing a traveling-cap similarly lined, and
presenting the appearance of one who suffers from a cold of the
snuffly, catarrhal kind.

He sneezed as Madame surged across the threshold, and would have told
her to shut the door, only that she divined his intention and
forestalled him, throwing her parasol upon a sofa and sinking into a
chair as ridiculous as his own.  Yet when her wealth of pale-hued
draperies poured over it, and the ripe outlines of her voluptuous
form concealed its crudities of design and coloring, it could be
forgiven for being in bad taste.

She looked in silence at the traveling-cap, not at its sulky wearer,
until, conscious of her sustained regard, he raised his hand to his
head.  In haste then, as though she dreaded the shock of his
purposeful abstention from the customary courtesy, she said:

"Do not take it off!  Pray keep it on!"

"Thanks!"  He uttered the word laconically, drooping his immense,
black-lashed eyelids over his fierce and staring eyes.  They, too,
were black, with the white, hard glitter of polished jet; black also
were the great curved eyebrows, the coarse and shining hair that fell
to his shoulders, the parted mustache, and the wedge-shaped beard
that depended from his boldly curved chin.  Rippling in small,
regular waves, suggestive of the labor of a primitive sculptor's
chisel, the inky _chevelure_ of this man with the cold,--taken in
conjunction with his large, aquiline nose, deep chest, fleshy torso,
and thick muscular limbs, reproduced the type of an ancient Assyrian
warrior, as represented in some carved and painted wall-frieze of
Nineveh or Babylon, marching in a triumphant procession of
Shalmaneser or Sennacherib.  Even the conical head-dress was
reproduced by the modern cap with ear-pieces, and turned-up border;
and the deep yellowish-white of the alabaster in which the ancient
sculptor wrought his bas-relief was reproduced in thick, smooth,
unblemished skin.

Handsome as he undoubtedly was in his exotic, Oriental style, even in
spite of influenza, Madame contemplated him with ill-concealed
distaste.  To a woman who loves, what matters the temporary
thickening of the beloved object's profile, even when accompanied by
attacks of sneezing and a running at the nose and eyes?  She can wait
the day when his voice will clear, and his leading feature will
regain its former beauty.  That is, as long as she continues to love.

The passion of this man and this woman had in its brief time burned
high and fiercely.  So does a fire of paper or straw.  Now Passion
lay dying, and Satiety and Weariness were the only watchers by the
death-bed.  Every twenty-four hours that passed over the heads of the
couple brought nearer the hour when these would give place to Hatred
and Dislike.  And meanwhile both were infinitely hipped.

"Every window....  Every curtain....  Must we, then, asphyxiate?..."
At the end of her patience, she made an angry gesture as though to
loosen the ribbon of mauve velvet that held a diamond locket at the
base of her round white throat, bit her full lip--and let her hand
drop idly into her silken lap again.

Her companion stretched out a pair of muscular, but shortish legs,
encased in dark green trousers with braided side-stripes, and looked
with interest at his patent boots.  Then he answered, speaking with a
drawling, nasal accent:

"Unless M. de Bismarck has supplied you with the means of averting a
singularly-unpleasant catastrophe, it may be that the answer to your
question should be 'Yes'!"

She understood that he questioned, and said, drooping her proud,
languorous eyes under the hard black stare of his:

"You would be wiser to speak in a lowered tone, when you refer
to--that personage.  One does not trifle with him--here or elsewhere!"

"The Pomeranian bear," said her companion, pouting a slightly swollen
lip, and dabbing gingerly at his reddened nostrils with a voluminous
cambric handkerchief exhaling the heavy perfume of opoponax, "has
claws and fangs.  Also a hug, in which friends of mine have stifled.
But they were men and you are an enchanting woman!"  He removed his
cap and bowed; resuming: "Besides you went to M. le Ministre with a
trump in your hand--a little Queen of Diamonds, fresh as a rosebud.
Have you played her, may I ask?"

He got up, pocketing his handkerchief, came over to her and stood
beside her, in the upright attitude which called attention to the
disproportion between his huge torso and his too-short legs.  He held
his furred cap upon his hip with one hand, and with the other stroked
his waved wedge-beard.  The rasping sound made by his heavily-ringed
fingers as they passed through the thick, crisp hairs irritated her
to anguish.  Yet not so long ago it had thrilled her to sensuous
ecstasy.

"I played the girl--and I have lost!"  Almost against her will a cry
broke from her.  "My God! what things he said to me!  My God! what
humiliations we women endure for men!"

"I had imagined, my Adelaide," said he of the Assyrian hair and
profile, showing in a smile a double row of teeth so perfect that
they struck the imagination as being carved out of two solid curves
of ivory--"that you were playing for your own advantage--even when
you played my game.  Did M. le Comte mention me at any point of the
interview?"

She started at the unexpected question.  Her voice shook a little in
the reply.

"He said that he had heard--that M. de Straz had lately visited
Berlin.  That his agents would tell him.  Of course!"

"He said nothing of--a flying visit of mine to Sigmaringen?"

She answered hastily:

"I think not.  No!  I am quite certain he did not."

"No?"

Straz sniffed and whipped out his handkerchief, grumbling:

"Yet the purport of my mission to that South German crow's-nest was
known to him--here in Berlin--I can prove it!--by nightfall of the
day I interviewed the Prince."  He added, trumpeting in his
handkerchief, "Of course, M. Bismarck has spies everywhere.  But all
the same it was quick work!"

Her face was immovable.  No guilty flush stained its smooth ivory
surface.  Only the lines about her scarlet mouth sharpened, that was
all.

Straz went on, peevishly, strolling to the fireplace, and leaning an
elbow on the corner of the mantelshelf.

"I suppose they call that princely hospitality--to send a man who has
traveled night and day, and is decanted out of a crazy
railway-station droschke at the door of their confounded Stammschloss
at five o'clock in the morning--to an inn!"

She said in a velvet tone of amorous insinuation, and with a glance
of sleepy fire:

"To an inn where Love lay waiting!..."

"Truly," he admitted, "but how were they to know that you were there?
What possible connection could have been imagined between two chance
travelers--I--arriving from Paris--you coming from Berlin?
Besides--to send me to a summer tavern on the banks of the
Danube!--when they have two hundred bedrooms at the Schloss!  If that
is princely hospitality, I tell you that I spit upon it!  I grind it
under the heel of my boot!"

Her nostrils dilated with disgust as he demonstrated by spitting on
the hearthrug.  She said, meeting his angry black stare with eyes
that were of the color of tawny wine:

"The Prince cannot have regretted his omission to accommodate you
with an apartment, when the Emperor's message was made known to him!"

He demanded:

"Am I a hired bravo?  _Pardieu_! your words suggest it.  Were either
of the old man's sons in danger personally, from me?  Not at all!  I
but repeated a lesson--gave a warning as it had been given....  But I
understand--you have been chagrined by the nature of your reception
from the Federal Chancellor!"

She returned, now flushed and breathing deeply:

"It is true.  I suffocate at the recollection.  Give me time to
breathe!"

She rose.  Straz said, going over to her, taking both her hands,
kissing them and replacing her in her chair:

"Compose yourself.  Let me understand the attitude M. le Ministre is
taking.  I need not remind you that not until I had learned from you
that, through the lamented Count Valverden, you were sufficiently
acquainted with M. de Bismarck to obtain an interview, did I suggest
that you should seek one.  Well, you did, and it has taken place.
You told him of the little episode I witnessed in January--on the day
of the funeral of Victor Noir at Neuilly.  Monseigneur the Prince
Imperial was riding with his governor and escort--the Avenue of the
Champs Elysées was blocked by troops.  A charming girl threw M. Lulu
a bunch of violets--made a little scene of loyalty and enthusiasm in
contrast with the unamiable attitude of the crowd assembled.  An
equerry dismounted and gave the flowers to Monseigneur.  He carried
them with him as he galloped toward the Bois de Boulogne.  Nothing of
importance in that, perhaps, had he not afterward sent for the
equerry who had picked up the flowers, and said to him, blushing,
'_Pray tell me who was she?_'  So skilled a master of phrases as M.
de Bismarck could hardly have undervalued the question from the heir
to an Empire, taken in combination with the blush.  Or discounted the
importance of the fact that, later, when the equerry brought him the
information that the charming unknown was the daughter and only child
of a certain gallant Colonel commanding the 777th Regiment of Mounted
Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard--at that moment quartered at
Versailles,--Monseigneur said, with another blush as ingenuous as the
first, 'I am glad she is the daughter of so brave a soldier!
Possibly I may meet her one of these days.'  Being told that her
baptismal name was 'Juliette' he blushed once more, and wrote it
down,--together with Mademoiselle's surname and address,--in a little
memorandum-book he habitually carries....  And there, my exquisite
Adelaide--if your narrative style did credit to my teaching, the
interest of M. de Bismarck should have been engaged."

She lowered her chin and drooped her somber eyelids, and said with
curling lips:

"It was.  He took out his watch, and told me: 'I can hear you for
three minutes longer!  Has the Prince Imperial--with the
disinterested assistance of those about him, altered that possibility
into a certainty?'  I explained to him then that nothing further had
come of the _rencontre_,--though measures had been taken to preserve
Monseigneur's interest from dying for lack of excitement, bouquets of
violets being sent to him at regular intervals, with a slip of paper
attached to the stems, upon which had been written in an unformed,
girlish hand--'_From one who prays for the Hope of France!_'

"And then?..."

"Then M. de Bismarck spoke, keeping his thumb all the time on the
watch-dial: 'So!  The girl plays the part of an ingenue for the
present!  Will she keep these airs of candor and innocence when she
has got her claws on that poor stripling?  And do you suggest that
the Prussian Secret Service should supply her with funds for the
carrying out of her design, whatever it may be?  Are we to lay our
heads together, like the Brethren in the libretto of Mehul's opera
"Joseph," and sing in chorus: _This is the heir.  Come, let us kill
him!_'"

"Even Beelzebub," said Straz, "can quote from Scripture when it suits
him.  I suppose you were annoyed, and showed it--which was an error
of judgment on your part!"

"I rose up," said she, and suited the action to the word, "with
indignation, assuring M. de Bismarck that his suspicions were unjust.
That the young girl mentioned was of ancient family and
irreproachable morals, convent-bred and highly educated.  And that I,
myself, being her nearest living relative of her own sex, was able to
vouch for the fact.  I added that the interest displayed in her by
Monseigneur the Prince--who until that moment had never been known to
look at a woman--led me to conceive that by aid of a few deft hints,
a little discreet encouragement--another distant glimpse--a meeting
accidentally brought about in some retired spot favorable to the
revival of first impressions, an influence might be brought to bear
upon the Imperial boy which might develop his mind and mold his
character.  Somehow in my agitation the name of Juliette de Bayard
escaped me.  'De Bayard,' exclaimed M. de Bismarck.  'So!  You are
her mother!'  Great Heaven!--the intolerable tone in which he uttered
the words!  Only the most abandoned of her sex could have supported
the insulting irony of the look accompanying them.  Choking, I took
my leave....  He accompanied me to the staircase, with a false
appearance of courtesy.  As I turned to descend, he hurled the last
insult of all!  Nicolas, do not ask me to repeat the sentences!--and
yet, I must have them written in another memory....  He twitted me
with my nationality before his secretary and servants.  He likened me
to a mythological character with an unpronounceable name....  He said
only a modern mother would be infamous enough to devote her only
daughter to Venus Something-Or-Other....  Next to my husband, I
detest that man!"

Straz had been pulling at his moist red underlip as she raved out her
story in a frenzy of rage and resentment, intensified by the
necessity of speaking in a lowered tone.  Now he dragged the feature
out as though it had been made of india-rubber, let it snap back, and
said, shrugging his bull's shoulders and getting up:

"You are a woman and he is--Bismarck!  He does not for the moment
want the wares you desire to sell him.  It is unlike him--the
diplomat who could encourage M. Benedetti to lay before him the
Emperor's _projet de traité_ in writing--and lock it away for use at
a future opportunity--not to be willing to secure an
advantage--placed before him with clearness and skill--in the newly
awakened fancy of a schoolboy who, if he lives, will be an
Emperor--for a charming and innocent young girl!"  He pronounced
these words as though they were smeared with something sweet and
luscious, licking his lips gently, and rolling his dead black eyes in
sensual enjoyment.  "As regards your husband, he has certainly not
replied to the letter of your solicitors, but why do you hate the
unlucky man?"

"Do you ask?" Adelaide demanded, with glittering eyes and heaving
bosom.  "Did he not refuse to divorce me?  Should I not have legally
borne the title of Baroness von Valverden if his sentimental
prejudices had not blocked the way?"

Straz pulled his waved beard, and said, delicately separating a
strand of it from the rest, and keeping it between his thick white
fingers:

"Sentimental, why sentimental?  Do you not even give him credit for
sufficient spirit to resent being made ridiculous?  The desire to be
revenged--you will not even allow him that?"

She bit her scarlet underlip and answered, breathing quickly:

"He was too good, too high-minded--too chivalrous--oh! 'tis
ridiculous, I admit!" for Straz commenced to titter silently,
screwing up the corners of his eyes and shaking his shoulders, as he
sat with his thick, short arms folded on his chest.  "An idea to make
you hug yourself as you are doing.  But true, nevertheless!  He would
have said--at this distance of time I can still hear him preaching:
'_I will avenge the injury to my honor when I am confronted with my
enemy.  I will not revenge myself upon the woman who deserted me for
him!_'"

The words came, not in her own voice.  Straz left off sniggering.  He
said to himself, considering her through narrowed lids:

"Those were De Bayard's actual words.  I wonder, since she has
neither seen nor heard from him since she left him, how it is she
knew that they were spoken?  Some obliging mutual friend may have
repeated them.  Or she read them in some letter of his, written to
Count Valverden.  That is quite possible.  But the question is,
whether she would detest him so bitterly if her passion for him were
absolutely extinguished.  She is even jealous when one speaks of
their daughter, whom he worships....  I will play her on this
string--it may be useful, who knows?"

Aloud he said:

"Detest your husband, dear friend, if it affords you entertainment.
Probably he deserves it, though women I have met who knew him vowed
him _un crème d'homme_, worthy of the name he bears."  He smiled in
his beard, hearing her foot tap upon the shining parquet, and went
on.  "Men have praised his gallantry and his disinterestedness----"

"'Disinterestedness!'" she mocked.  "Truly--to the point of
fanaticism he is disinterested.  Have we not to thank that
characteristic for the ruin of our plans?"

Said Straz:

"A little more subtlety upon the part of your solicitors, and you
might have found M. le Colonel less obstinately inclined to
discourage the idea of a reconciliation.  To have entrusted a
portrait to the hands of the lawyers would have been an excellent
move.  Once convinced that the thirteen or fourteen years that have
elapsed since you--parted--have increased rather than diminished the
beauty that once he worshiped--and I fancy De Bayard would have
accepted your terms!"

He sniggered, and waited as the violet shadows about her brilliant
eyes deepened, and she breathed more quickly.  Then he went on:

"They were generous--I allude to the conditions.  Ninety men out of a
hundred would have accepted them.  For what has De Bayard to condone
that others have not winked at?  You were a mere girl, weary of
separation from a husband who doubtless consoled himself after his
own fashion, for his detention in the Crimea.  Bored to
desperation--condemned to spend your days in the care of a child, and
in listening to the imbecile grumblings of a sick old devotee,--point
out to me the woman, young, beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious--who
would not--in your place--have done precisely as you did?"

She threw her head a little backward, bringing into prominence the
superb modeling of her columnar throat and the heavy lines of the
lower jaw.  Her wine-colored eyes considered him between their
narrowed lids.  She savored his words, silently, with palpitating
nostrils, and rippling movements of the muscles of her tightly closed
lips.  And the qualities of treachery and cruelty, mingling in her
strange character with sensuality, and pride, and recklessness, were
written upon her beauty as plainly as they are stamped upon the
individuality of a tigress, or a poisonous snake.

"You speak of weariness ... of boredom..."  She spoke between her
teeth, accentuating the vowels and prolonging the sibilants:
"Nicolas, it was hellish--that _ménage_ at Auteuil!..."  She clenched
the white hand that rested on the chair-arm and continued, looking
with burning eyes through Straz into the past.

"That woman--my husband's mother, with her parade of devotion for the
absent.  With her ceaseless repetition of 'my son,' 'my son's child,'
and 'my son's wife!' ... Grand Dieu!--how she enraged me!  How she
made me hate--hate--hate them!--yes! all three....  Perhaps myself
also, most bitterly of all!"

"We have a curious proverb in my country," commented Straz, with his
snigger: "'_I draw water from a well that has no bottom when I tell
my gossip of the faults of my mother-in-law!_'"

She said, with undisguised scorn:

"I am not a collector of curios from your country!"

"Ah, but wait!  Hear the rest of it!" said Straz, dexterously
embroidering on the original: "'_But when my mother-in-law wishes to
acquaint my husband with my good qualities, she will write them with
the plume from a gnat's head, on the paper that wrapped a butterfly's
egg, when she has bought her ink at the shop where they sell none!_'"

Adelaide continued, ignoring the labored witticism:

"In the letter of farewell that I wrote to De Bayard I said '_Your
mother will console you, I have no doubt!_' ... How often I have
imagined I could hear her talking to him....  He would weep on her
knees, like a schoolboy.  She would lead him to look at the child,
asleep in its cot by the side of her bed, and tell him, '_Do not
fear!  She will not be like her mother!  She will grow up candid and
discreet and virtuous!_'  Everything that Adelaide was not, you
understand....  Ha, ha, ha!  Absurd old creature!  Were she not dead,
I should detest her still!"

Straz mentally commented: "The daughter has inherited the hatred,
unless I am mistaken."  Aloud he said:

"The prophecy, if made, has not been fulfilled, my Adelaide....
Mademoiselle, if inferior to her mother in splendor and beauty,
certainly has been dowered with her elegance and charm."  He bunched
the fingers of his right hand, kissed them, and launched the kiss,
conjecturally, in the direction of Paris.  "A pocket edition of
Psyche before that little affair with Cupid!  A rare jewel!  A _chic_
type, give you my word!"

The daintily shod foot had beaten time, as Straz enlarged upon the
theme of Juliette's perfections, to what might have been the tune of
a tarantella: now it ceased.  She laughed in the Roumanian's face,
and cried, still laughing:

"A child! ... A schoolgirl--who has seen no more of the world than
the pearl in the oyster!  All this is too funny--_give you my word!_"

Said Straz, lolling his head against the chair-back and licking his
red lips cattishly:

"Ah, but when the pearl-diver opened the oyster, he said: '_Here is a
gem worth a Kingdom, or an Empire, when it shall be polished and
properly set!_'"

"'Or an Empire!'"

She echoed the three words, throwing her head back in imitation of
Straz's attitude, and looking at him with languid provocation.  Then
she yawned, showing her perfect teeth and the tip of a rosy tongue,
and remarked with an air of boredom:

"My friend, whether your pearl be worth an Empire or a cabbage-plot,
your chance of proving its value is forever forfeited, thanks to the
obstinacy of M. de Bayard."

Said Straz:

"Our plan would have been easier to carry out,--had M. de Bayard been
more--complaisant."

She rose up, her beautiful face livid and gray under its artificial
roses.  Her eyebrows writhed like little live snakes, her eyes burned
like wind-blown torches.  She spoke, looking past her confederate in
the chair, and with a voice he barely recognized:

"His mother must have prayed her Saints for this," she said, "that I
should always fail in the moment when triumph seemed most sure.  Max
Valverden would have married me--it is absolutely certain!--had not
Fate sent him back on leave from the Staff in Austria but a couple of
hours too soon.  Weak, sentimental Max! always threatening extreme
measures.  Who would have believed him capable of carrying out that
menace so often reiterated!  But this I know.  Had he confronted me
with what his letter termed '_the unmistakable proofs of my appalling
treachery,_' I would have convinced him even against the testimony of
his own ears and eyes.  But De Bayard--but my husband!----"

She had forgotten Straz; she saw nothing but her own frustrated
ambitions, the dead body of the man whose suicide had robbed her of a
title, and the living husband whose stern rejection of her overtures
had left her forever outside the social pale....

"Do I not know the man he is!  With another it would have been so
easy.  He would have granted an interview,--I would have been
suppliant and humble--I would have told my tale in such a voice! ...
_You were away....  I was young and inexperienced....  I foolishly
yielded to the persuasions of another....  Once I had let Valverden
kiss me I felt myself smirched for ever.  I fled with him because I
dared not meet your eyes!_"

Straz sniggered.  She went on, not hearing him....

"He would have taken me to his heart again.  Once reinstated there I
would have regained the _entrée_ to Society.  For a woman who has
lived within the pale--even if she finds it better fun outside--it is
hideous to be _déclassée_.  A few triumphs,--a little intriguing--and
I should have been received at Court....  For the Emperor is above
all a man of the world; and the Empress loves to surround herself
with beautiful and witty women.  With gifts, talents, charm like
mine, I should have carried all before me!--I should have reigned--I
should have drunk the wine of Success from a goblet of diamond."

"Without doubt," agreed Straz, "had M. le Colonel consented to
receive you.  Yet I contend, his refusal is a hopeful sign, if it
means that he is afraid."

She winced as though he had thrust a knife in her side, and cried out:

"Afraid!  You do not know him....  No!--I tell you, that it is to him
as though I had never existed....  Did we meet, he would look me in
the face--pass me by without the twitch of a muscle--without the
flicker of a glance....  But you have shown me how I may reach his
heart--and one day I shall thrust my hand into his breast and tear it
out and trample on it....  It is she--my daughter--who will
accomplish this!..."

Said Straz, pushing back his chair, getting up and blowing his nose
loudly:

"Then the sooner we exchange these avenues of dusty lime-trees,
choked with crowds of bellowing Teutons, for the boulevards of Paris,
the better.  We shall, of course, be forced to return by a _détour
via_ Brussels--the Rhine Valley railways being reserved for the
transport of troops.  Passports can be had on application to the
usual authorities.  The only insuperable obstacle to our departure
is--the bill!"

Madame came back to consciousness of sordid things as the Roumanian
ostentatiously turned out his trouser-pockets.

"You are at an _impasse_ for lack of funds?" she asked him.

"Upon my life, my soul!" Straz smilingly assured her, "I am at
present without a radish!  A sum of two thalers negotiable currency
constitutes my stock of cash.  Although, as I have told you, I carry
secreted on my person an order for"--he tapped his bosom--"ten
thousand francs payable from the Secret Funds of the Imperial
Government.  This I tried to cash before I left Paris----"  He
measured off an infinitesimal quantity of finger-nail and displayed
it to her.  "Do you think I got a franc from anyone?  No!--you know
better!  The Emperor's methods are understood too well.  And thus it
is that the disinclination of M. de Bismarck to finance our plan for
the union of two young and ingenuous lovers has hit me in the
midriff.  A thousand curses on his niggardliness!"

As though prompted by some recollection of Adelaide's previous
display of tragic passion, he scowled portentously, spat at the
fireplace, then began to strut about, vaporing and waving his ringed,
hairy-backed hands.

"Penniless....  What damnable absurdity!  The Emissary of a
Potentate!  The Bearer of the Bowstring--with Life or Death in my
hand.  For lack of cash I travel second-class to that accursed South
German Principality--I stoop to put up at a third-rate inn.  My
Mission performed, I yield to the promptings of my ardent nature.  In
the company of her who reigns sultana of my soul,--who for my sake
has shared the discomforts of that abominable caravanserai--I return
to the barbarous capital of the Hohenzollerns--I risk my person in
the streets of Berlin.  Had my brain been cooler--had your image
glowed less seductively before my mental vision"--he rolled his black
eyes amorously and laid a thick ringed hand upon his breast--"it may
be that I should not have accompanied you,--that I might have hurried
back express to Paris--presented myself to my Imperial master--and
reaped the golden prize!"

"Say rather," responded Madame, in a tone not untinged with acrimony,
"that as the result of your unsuccessful endeavor to enlist the
interest of M. de Bismarck in that charming plan to unite two
ingenuous young people--you are placed in a position that is not
without unpleasant possibilities.  My _beaux yeux_ are less to blame
than your ambition '_to kill_,' as the English say, '_two birds with
one stone!_'  You----"

"Say 'we,' not 'you,' my divine Adelaide," corrected Straz, with
tender insistence, "for if not in actuality husband and wife, we are
thus inscribed upon the bureau-register.  'One in sorrow, one in
joy,' to quote a poet of my nation.  I wish you were acquainted with
the verses of Stepan Mieciwycz.  They would afford you exquisite
delight."

"Possibly," said Madame, with an ominous hardening of the facial
muscles, and a whiteness about the lips.  "What does not afford me
delight is that these brigands downstairs have threatened to seize
our luggage if their claim is not satisfied within an hour."

"_Sapristi!_" commented the Roumanian.  "A beautiful imbroglio!
And--as I have no luggage--beyond a traveling valise," he added with
a gentle snigger, "your trunks, bonnet-boxes, imperials,
traveling-bags, and so forth--must become the prey of the management.
It grieves me to the soul that you should suffer this denudation at
the hands of these coarse Germans.  But what I cannot prevent, I can
but deplore!"

"And if," she said in a vibrating voice of anger, "these coarse
Germans should lay hands upon your person, for the purpose of
ascertaining for themselves the state of your purse! ... What then?"

"What then?" Straz's cynical composure broke up.
"_Istenem!--Istenem_!  Nothing could be more dangerous!  My letter of
instructions from M. de Gramont, annotated in the Emperor's own hand!
The official letter, of introduction from the Minister to Prince
Antony--the copies of those three telegrams His Highness sent from
Sigmaringen--the order on the Privy Purse--all concealed in a silk
belt I am in the habit of wearing--these Prussians will find the
papers should they search me to the skin.  Then I, _with my
wife_----"  He italicized the sentences.

"One in sorrow as in joy, I think you said!" interpolated Madame,
bitterly.

"We should be arrested--dragged before official
interrogators!--imprisoned!--Oh! do not imagine I am laying on the
colors too thickly.  Is it incredible that M. de Bismarck might
welcome an opportunity--pending the result of this war--to turn the
key on us?"

"Why on us?" demanded Adelaide.  "Do _I_ wear a silken belt
containing incriminating letters?  Orders on the Secret Funds ...
copies of Hohenzollern telegrams?"

Straz looked at her, and his black stare hardened suspiciously.  The
swift Oriental blood that pigmented his eyes and skin, and fed the
luxuriant growth of hair upon him, leaped in the dark to the
conclusion that he had been betrayed.  He said, smiling, and speaking
with a lisp, a trick of his that boded ill, had she but known it:

"Not to my knowledge....  I have never searched while you were
sleeping,--or spiced the draught that made the sleep profound."

"My thanks," she said, keeping her countenance magnificently, "for
the glass of mulled Burgundy I gave you when you returned from the
Schloss.  You were suffering from chill--you shivered and burned
alternately....  Like a woman, I did what I could--and you are
ungrateful, like all other men."

"My soul," simpered Straz, "I adore you madly.  But like every other
man, I am a son of Adam, and you are a daughter of Madame Eve.  And a
little snake hisses in my ear whenever I am not looking at you: '_She
would be truer to her sex if she were false!_'"


"Nicolas!  This is too much!  No, no, I beg of you to let me leave
you!"

Adelaide had put her hand to her heart, given him a look in which
passionate tenderness seemed to strive with wounded pride, quitted
her chair, and hurried, the Roumanian hot upon her heels, to the door
communicating with the boudoir.  Detained by his feverish grasp upon
her hand, prisoned by the muscular arm about her waist, she could
only reiterate her desire for freedom.  Straz asseverated:

"Yes! when you have forgiven me!  Pardon, beloved Adelaide!  Life of
my life, you know we Slavs are naturally suspicious--it is always in
our blood!"

He thrust his face to hers, amorously ogling.  The slight thickening
of the consonants, due to catarrh, made his passionate speech sound
grotesquely ridiculous.  The approach of his mouth, the contact of
his breath, reminded the fastidious Adelaide that such colds could be
transferred.  So she smiled dazzlingly upon him, and gently freed
herself from his enfolding tentacles, leaning her softly-tinted cheek
downwards to the shoulder her own overtopped.

"You are pardoned, my beloved one!  But think with me how this bill
may be settled!  What if you really should be in danger in this
place!"

He shrugged hopelessly, and ejaculated:

"_Sapristi_!  I can conceive it possible....  But--hampered by the
lack of money, what are we to do?"

She said with a start, as if suddenly enlightened:

"Dearest, I have some jewels....  Think nothing of the sacrifice! ...
Will it not be made for him who is more to me than all?..."

"Angel! ... Now I know, indeed, that Adelaide is true to me!  Pardon
thy slave, who dared to deem otherwise!"

Straz devoured her hand with kisses, became more enterprising as she
grew, or seemed to grow, more yielding.  But she put him from her,
suffering her bright glance to linger on him amorously, saying in
tones of liquid sweetness, with a bewitching accent of rebuke:

"Be good now!  I am tired, and must positively dine in my room
to-night.  My maid will bring you in a few moments a case
containing--what I mentioned just now.  Late as it is, shops are
still open ... there is a firm of jewelers--Müller and Stettig in the
Charlotten-Strasse, who will buy such things for ready money....  It
should bring sufficient to supply us with funds for a long time....
Poor Valverden paid eighteen thousand thalers for it!"  She added as
Straz licked his lips appreciatively: "It is a star of emeralds and
brilliants you have often seen me wear."

"Thou art my star!  O incomparable Adelaide!"

She pushed him from her, yet oozing with impassioned admiration.  She
gently shut the boudoir-door--and noiselessly shot the bolt.  Then
her face changed, and all her disgust for Straz, his cheap
compliments--his slovenliness--his arrogance and self-satisfaction,
his impecuniousness and his cold in the head, was written on her face
and expressed by every movement of her body.  She ran across the
boudoir, abandoning her air of languor, burst into the bedroom
beyond, and aroused a dozing maid.

"Wake up, Mariette!  Find me--it is in the red morocco jewel-case in
the brown leather imperial--the diamond star with emerald points!"

While the woman rummaged, the mistress swiftly reviewed the
situation.  The cold, clear brain that dwelt behind that velvet mask
of sensuous beauty had formulated a plan for getting rid of the Slav.

He would be an enemy dangerous as a rattlesnake, she told herself.
But--trap your rattlesnake, and he cannot bite.  On the other hand,
his subtle capacity for intrigue--his swift Oriental cunning--even
his masculine strength,--made of him a useful ally, even when he had
no more secrets for a clever woman to ferret out and sell.

For the brief telegram in cipher, dispatched by Madame to a
studiously unsuspicious address in Berlin before nightfall of the day
of the arrival in Sigmaringen--with the later-sent copies of
Gramont's letters--the formal introduction which had secured the
Agent from the Tuileries an audience of Prince Antony, and the four
pages of secret instructions margined with the Emperor's annotations,
had brought in a handsome sum of money, thanks to the potency of
mulled Burgundy heavily dosed with laudanum.  Adelaide had known a
moment of deadly terror when the Slav's black eyes had looked at her
with that sinister stare of suspicion, and his conjectures had leaped
in the dark, so very near the actual verity.  She felt no desire to
encounter that look again.

So she pondered, fingering the bulky roll of Prussian banknotes paid
her by Privy Councillor Bucher a few days previously,--how she might
best get rid of Straz without another scene.  His Oriental cunning,
his childish vanity, his petulance and sensuality, his colossal greed
of money and money's worth, blinded her to the ruthlessness and
ferocity of his tigerish nature, and provoked her to brave a risk far
greater than she guessed.

She would get rid of him--play the game he had devised, without him;
and win, in spite of cold water thrown by M. de Bismarck.  The trap
he had planned to catch the son of the Emperor should yet be set
successfully.  Was not the intended bait of living maiden's flesh her
own?

She felt no pity for the innocence of the girl, or for the
inexperience of the stripling.  She was curious to know how--under
given circumstances--they would comport themselves; she was eager to
bring to terms the Minister who had contemptuously rejected her
proposal--she thirsted above all for revenge upon the husband she had
wronged.

Straz stood in the way, therefore Straz must be swept aside.  His
mission to Prince Antony performed, the Napoleon would have no more
use for the instrument.  Perhaps that order on the Privy Purse would
never be paid?

She arrived at this conclusion as the maid brought the red morocco
jewel-case.  She unlocked it with a key she wore in a bracelet, and
drew out a shagreen-covered box containing the vaunted ornament.  It
had not been given her by her dead lover; the story of the thousands
spent on it was no more reliable than the doubleted emeralds, and the
thin central star of diamonds set flush with the gold setting of the
toy.

But it looked well; and Straz was no good judge of jewels, and she
had not paid Müller and Stettig the moderate sum demanded as its
price.  The merchants had been rude enough to dun her, and when Straz
should appear and tender the article for sale to them, the manager
would summon a policeman, and the Roumanian would be detained.  He
would refer to herself, but long before a representative of the firm
could appear to interrogate her, she would have paid the hotel-bill
and departed, leaving the price of the trinket in the hands of the
management.  Flaws in the plan, no doubt, but on the whole it was
workable.  She rose, took the star from the case stamped with the
too-revealing names of Müller and Stettig, glanced in the mirror,
left the bedroom and swept through the boudoir.

"Nicolas!" she whispered, unbolting the door noiselessly, and opening
it a little way.

"My Peri, I am here!" snuffled the impassioned Roumanian.

She opened the door a little further, and thrust out a white palm
cradling the glittering gewgaw.  He pounced on it, leaving a kiss
instead.

"Remember, Müller and Stettig, 85 Charlotten Strasse.  Fly!"

"Sultana, I depart upon the wings of Love, to return like the bee to
the rose, laden with golden pollen."

"Your wings, unlucky bee, will be clipped by a policeman," Madame
said inwardly, as the drawing-room door shut and the Slav's footsteps
crossed the little ante-room.  There was a murmur of voices, that of
Straz raised as if in surprise or interrogation.  Probably the
gilt-buttoned functionary had been lying in wait for him with the
hotel-bill.  She listened a moment, heard no more, and went back,
saying to her attendant:

"Pack everything.  We leave at once for Brussels."

The maid said, with peculiar demureness:

"And Monsieur, Madame?"

Her mistress told her:

"Monsieur has gone to call upon his bankers."

The maid responded with even greater demureness:

"Madame should know that in her absence Monsieur endeavored----"

Madame said hastily:

"Pay no heed.  These are customs common in Roumania!"

The woman continued, bridling with all the scorn Lesbia's
waiting-maid feels for the penniless gallant:

"Monsieur endeavored to borrow of me ten thalers...."

Madame shrugged and bade her:

"Go on with your packing!  Monsieur does not accompany us!"

And without the exchange of another word the mistress and maid
understood each other perfectly.  The impecunious Straz was to be
jettisoned for the lightening of the ship.

Meanwhile, Fate willed the Slav should encounter on the threshold of
the ante-room the emissary of Messrs. Müller and Stettig, who had
called for the third time to demand payment of the bill.  This being
offered for his inspection as the responsible male of the party,
threw unexpected light on the intentions of Adelaide.

"Sixteen hundred thalers," he murmured.  "Reasonable, too--most
reasonable!  I have seen Madame wearing the ornament, and admired it
very much.  Yes, if you desire it, I will speak to the lady.  It is
doubtless mere forgetfulness that has deferred the settlement of your
claim.  Wait here!"

He unwound a knitted silk scarf that was folded round his bull-neck.
He turned down the collar of his Astrakhan-lined coat, and went back
with noiseless steps.  The door of the boudoir was ajar.  He
satisfied himself that Adelaide was in the bedroom beyond it.  He
stepped in, glanced about him, formulating his plan, then locked the
boudoir-door, put the key in his pocket, crossed the room, and
knocked upon the door of the bedroom, swiftly stepping aside, so that
the door--which opened outward,--should conceal him from those within.

"Who is it knocks?  Open and see!" he heard Madame command her maid
within the bedroom.  The maid appeared, crossed the boudoir, found
the door fast, and returned to tell her mistress.  But then she found
the door of the bedroom she had quitted was bolted on the other side.
There was no sound within, but a kind of rustling, and once or twice
a footstep on the carpet.  So, with the patience of her caste, the
maid sat down upon a sofa until it should please her lady to undo the
bedroom-door.

Her lady was incommoded by the grip of Straz's thick hairy hands upon
her windpipe.  He freed one in a moment--and then Adelaide was being
blinded by the folds of a silken scarf....  Long, wide, and elastic,
it served the Roumanian's purpose admirably.  Perhaps it had been
useful in that particular way before.  And as he rolled and twisted
it, he whispered sniggeringly in the little pearl-white ear that
jutted from between the crimson swathings, almost as though it had
been purposely left free:

"So, my Sultana!--so,--you would betray me!..."

Enveloped, she stammered through the silken meshes some barely
intelligible sentences.  The folds tightened chokingly--and the words
died in a gasp.

"Mercy!... Forgive!..."

"Surely, my proud Sultana," said the thickish voice with the
catarrhal snuffle in it.  "What will men not pardon to beauty such as
yours!"

She moaned and strove to tear away the smooth bands that were
suffocating her.  He whipped a velvet ribbon from the toilet-table,
brought down her hands, and bound them behind her back.  That little
shell-shaped ear was purplish by this time.  At the point of losing
consciousness, she felt him softly groping for the treasure hidden in
her bosom--she heard the crackling of the roll of notes withdrawn.

"_Do not...!_" she tried to say, but no sound came from her but a
groaning; and through the roaring of her blood she heard him answer
back:

"Do not rob you! would you plead, my peerless Adelaide?  Far from it.
I merely take from you what is my own!  For--there was the taste of
opium in my mouth when I awakened in Love's embraces.  And
conviction, stronger than proof, convinces me that I have been sold.
Else why this store of honey in the breast of the Queen of the
garden, while the black bee was sent roaming to gather store
elsewhere?  Eh, eh!  I think I could manage to guess at the reason
why I was to have been detained by those jewelers on suspicion of
theft!  My Sultana would have vanished, leaving no address behind
her....  _Istenem!_ but the emerald star would have served your
purpose well!"

There was a silence.  Rings of fire, stars of emerald whirled before
Adelaide's blinded vision.

"Do not be afraid, my Queen, I am not going to murder you!" chuckled
the thick voice in the little swollen blackening ear.  "Only to spoil
your beauty a little--nothing more terrible.  Your eyes will be less
clear, your skin less dazzlingly unblemished, after this experience.
You will never again look in your mirror without remembering me!"

Rocking and swaying, ready to fall, she was only kept upright by the
arm of Straz about her body.  She felt him free that arm, shifting
her weight against his great chest, and as she lay blind and helpless
there, his snigger vibrated through her horribly.  Then--the smooth,
slippery folds of the silk scarf tightened murderously, stopping all
breath, shutting out consciousness.  Whelmed in an abyss of
Nothingness, she felt and knew no more....

"Madame is a little unwell," said Straz, who regained the
ante-chamber by the way of a dressing-room communicating with
Madame's bedroom.  "She will call on Messrs. Müller and Stettig
to-morrow, and settle their account.  Meanwhile"--for the
representative of the firm was beginning to expostulate--"she returns
the emerald-pointed star with her regrets."  He added smilingly as
the relieved _employé_ gratefully pocketed the trinket: "Ladies are
not business-like in these little matters of money.  But Heaven, who
inspired in man the desire to see them well-dressed, has conferred on
him the privilege of paying their bills."

He accompanied the jeweler's foreman down to the vestibule, chatting
agreeably.  He carried no valise, so was allowed to pass out with the
man.  Keeping one thick, hairy-backed hand thrust down into a pocket
of his Astrakhan-furbished shooting-jacket, close-clutched upon the
solid roll of Prussian banknotes, reft from that smooth and perfumed
hiding-place.




XXXI

"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red Prince--as
people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in virtue of his
partiality for the crimson uniform of his regiment, the Ziethen
Hussars,--have departed amidst scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to
take over the respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps.
On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which I pen
these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open landau drawn by two
superb black Hungarian horses to join his Ministers and his Chief of
the Great Staff at the station, where waited the special train
destined to convey the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field
Armies of Germany to the immediate Seat of War."

There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the writer's skull
came smartly into contact with the uncushioned seat-back of the
gray-painted, semi-partitioned railway transport-car, in which, with
some forty blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard, P. C.
Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in a din so
comprehensive that you could only make your neighbor hear by putting
your mouth to his ear and bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with
dust and smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness,
that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it with
sensible effort.

The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began where the
glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the eighth of a company
appropriated to themselves the corner-seats.  Sandwiched between two
large and heated warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee,
and his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs, P. C. Breagh
abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and continued to write, using
the old straw hat which crowned the knapsack as a support for a
notebook.

"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring under the
influence of emotion, accompanied His Majesty.  A thunderstorm
coruscated and detonated overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed
out, and King Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of
enthusiastic '_Hoch's_.'  The object of their acclamations kept
continually smoothing his heavy white mustache with the right,
ungloved hand, between the salutes with which he acknowledged the
plaudits of his people--a characteristic gesture of the veteran
monarch when..."

The pencil faltered.  "Under the influence of emotion" could not be
used again, because it had already done duty for the Queen, whose
eyes, poor lady! had been red with crying.  P. C. Breagh knocked off
to sharpen his pencil and read over what he had set down.
"Coruscated and detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the
thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a good deal
nearer the mark.  And "characteristic gesture" was loftier language
than "familiar trick" or "habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at
it, it was true, but this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for
letters, "describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday
people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and smelled."

Still, one could not hope to please everybody--and this was a
descriptive article--not a chatty news-letter.  When complete, it
would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading Daily, with the brief
intimation that more like it might be had--at a price.  That it would
draw commissions, P. C. Breagh believed implicitly.  There was a
stately stodginess about the style that could not fail to impress.
So he continued as "_Die Wacht am Rhein_" broke out once more; and
the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand neighbor tickled
his ribs and made him goosefleshy.

"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."

"Ach, ach! but the old man looks tired!" people in the front had
holloaed to one another.  All the week-end one had seen the King
bowling up, and down, and round-about Berlin in his little one-horse
carriage, with a single, mounted orderly-officer in attendance;
giving out colors, addressing the regiments, conversing in short,
soldierly sentences with the field-officers in command.

"Baron von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff," went on the
pencil, "the War-Minister General von Roon, and the Federal
Chancellor and Minister-President General Count von
Bismarck-Schönhausen, with the personnel of the Great Headquarters
Staff and the mobilized Foreign Office, received His Majesty at the
railway-station, tastefully adorned with black-and-white bunting,
carpeted with red, and garlanded with roses, said to be the favorite
floral emblem of the septuagenarian potentate...."

It could not be denied by P. C. Breagh,--the painfully hammered-out
paragraphs smacked of the sample supplied by Mr. Knewbit for
avoidance.  "Sham technicality and sentimental slumgullion," he
seemed to hear that rigorous critic saying, so loudly and in such a
pouncing manner, that P. C. Breagh hurriedly scratched out the
sentence about the floral emblems, though "septuagenarian potentate"
must be reserved for use later, as offering a refreshing change from
"aged King" and "veteran" or "venerable monarch."  "Hoary-headed
Ruler" would come in usefully by-and-by....

_Bump--bump--jolt, ker-link-ker-lank ker-lunk!_ ...

The two powerful engines, pulling a train-load of fully two-thirds of
a regiment at fullest war-strength, were slowing up at a station: ...
A roar of voices kept continually at crescendo hailed the arrival.
Another roar, mixed with fragments of patriotic song, replied.  The
platform presented a sea of heads of both sexes, backed by an
imposing array of shelves, decorated with foliage, dangling lamps and
national bunting; surmounted by a bust of the King between busts of
Moltke and Bismarck, and literally groaning under piles of sausages,
loaves, cheeses, oleaginous packages of sandwiches and pastry--rows
of gilt and silver-foiled wine-bottles, and then more rows....

Barrels of genuine Berlin beer, adorned with the Hohenzollern colors,
stood hospitably ready to replenish glasses and mugs.  Filled with
the amber nectar, trays of these, suspended from the shoulders of
stalwart youths, wearing Red Cross arm-badges, and
white-muslin-draped maidens adorned with crimson sashes, waited to
quench the thirst of Prussia's soldier sons.  And taking in the
condition of things at a glance, said one of the two N.C.O.'s in
charge of the party:

"_Himmeldonnerwetter!_ ... Lads, there seems no help for it.  We have
got to tuck in again!"

And simultaneously with the bass response: "At your service, Herr
Sergeant!" and almost before the slow-going locomotives stopped,
panting Samaritans hurled themselves upon the carriages, and arms
ending in hands proffering packages of comestibles and tobacco,
bottles of beer or frothing glasses, or packets of cigars, were
thrust in between the window-bars, until every man's jaws were busy,
and every man's hands were laden....  Until even the modestly
retiring P. C. Breagh had been compelled to accept a mighty hunk of
iced plum-cake and a giant package of liver-sandwiches, and forced to
empty a foaming beaker of brown Bavarian.

"Why not, why not, when they have plenty for everyone?" hiccoughed a
stalwart private, who had emptied many mugs: "Won't every fellow of
the regiment find his double-pint waiting him, when the next train
comes up?"


There was plenty for everyone.  Not only the troop-train that would
follow this, containing the odd thousand rank-and-file and the rest
of the regimental officers, would find the "cool blonde" and the
"dark brunette," the savory snack and the soothing weed, as ready for
the alleviation of possible requirements as they had been at every
halting-place--the City of Hanover severely excepted--since the huge
send-off at Berlin on the afternoon of the previous day.

Every class contributed to the refreshment of the soldiers.  Wealthy
brewers sent drayloads of barrels, rich aristocrats gave wines from
their cellars.  The bakers bestowed bread, the pork-butchers
contributed hams and sausages, the tobacconists cigars and
pipe-tobacco.  While the cook baked cakes with her perquisites of
lard and dripping: and the servant-maid took from her scant savings
for the purchase of a gross of match-boxes, to distribute at the
station when the military trains came in.

Poor was the wight who could be liberal in nothing.  And thus thought
the little old woman when she cooked her dozen ginger-snaps.

She was a tiny little monkey-faced old peasant, in a frilled white
mutch, jaded red shawl, blue apron and brown-striped drugget
petticoat; and she stood quite alone in a clear space left upon the
platform of a little country station, as the eager philanthropists
about her crowded to lavish hospitality on the inmates of the
incoming train.  As the pastry and the cakes, the coffee, beer, and
spirits flowed in at the windows and down the throats of the wearers
of the blue, white-faced Guard uniforms, this little old woman made
no effort to offer her ginger-snaps, which were ranged in three rows
of four on a dingy white cloth in a little broken basket, and were
palpably melting under the rays of an ardent July sun.

Her timidity and her feebleness had kept her back, but when the
Colonel in command issued the order to entrain, and the officers who
had clanked in pairs up and down the platform, good-humoredly
answering the questions of old ladies, and gallantly returning the
admiring glances of young ones, accepting a leaf-full of fruit here,
or a glass of Rhine wine or a cigarette there,--began to take their
places,--she mustered courage to hold up her basket to a dandy young
subaltern and murmur: "Please to take!"

Next moment--the dandy could not have meant it,--but as he pushed
away the extended basket, and swung round upon his heel, his silver
sword-knot caught in the frayed cloth or broken wicker-work, and down
went the basket, and the snaps were spilt upon the ground....

"Thou dear God!" the little old woman cried in anguish.  "_Ach--ach!_
the good, the delicious ginger-snaps! ... Who now will eat them?
_Ach!--Ach!_"

And up to her poor eyes went her blue apron.  It was a terrible
tragedy to her.  Some people pitied her.  Others were heartless
enough to laugh after the fashion of the blond, red-lipped
officer--and to laugh once more at the summary fashion of his
setting-down.

For a terrible, rasping voice said, speaking behind the dandy
subaltern, and full four inches above the level of his ear:

"Under-Lieutenant Fahle will remedy the damage done by his
carelessness before he resumes his place in the train!"

Thus the train waited while the offender, blood-red with rage and
confusion, picked up the sticky brown cakes with his snowily gloved
fingers, and replaced them in the broken basket, amidst the little
old woman's humble apologies, and entreaties that the gracious
gentleman would not trouble himself.  When the Colonel, owner of the
rasping voice above referred to, in conjunction with a bushy scarlet
beard and bristling mustaches, a stately height of six feet four
inches, a regulation waist, and three rows of decorations, performed
an act of bravery for which he deserved another medal still.  For,
selecting the snap that looked cleanest, this dauntless warrior
gravely took it between his thumb and finger, bit a piece out, and
declared it excellent.  Then, amidst the rapturous plaudits of the
onlookers, he solemnly saluted the twittering old lady, and swung
himself loftily back into his carriage, thundering out once more the
order:

"Entrain!"

Conceive the banging of doors, the bumping and clanking, the cheers
and the tears _da capo_, and the curtseys the little old woman
dropped, one after another, almost faster than one could count.
Suppose the train moving slowly on, and a tricksy spirit inspiring a
wag among the rank-and-file aboard, to shout to her:

"Hey there, Mother Ginger-snaps! give us one before we go!"

Twenty voices took up the cry, and blue cloth-covered arms were
thrust out between the carriage window-bars.  Hands waggled,
soliciting the sugary boon.  And the little old woman, torn between
the desire to give and the impossibility of giving,--danced like a
hen on a hot griddle, until a giant porter, compassionating her
plight, snatched her up like a large doll, and ran with her beside
the moving carriages, holding her out at arm's length, as she upheld
her basket, until all the ginger-snaps were gone.

Instinctively as P. C. Breagh had felt that the cumbrous
grandiloquence of his descriptive article would be snorted at by Mr.
Knewbit, so he knew that the little incident of the ginger-snaps
would afford his patron delight.  Therefore he tucked it away in a
safe pigeon-hole of his memory, with a description of the rough,
gay-painted, crowded wooden box he sat in, odoriferous with its
conglomeration of smells, based on the combined stenches of tallow
and perspiring humanity, laced with the sharp sour of malt, and
mercifully tempered with the fumes of strong tobacco.

Piff!  The hot, cinder-flavored draughts that raced in over the
glazed half-windows were powerless to freshen or dilute the
atmosphere.  Yet among the varied types of men who, their heavy
knapsacks disposed in iron racks above them, sat packed as close as
sardines on the narrow benches, were not a few, who, judging by the
mute evidence of their well-groomed skins and carefully kept
finger-nails, their finer hair and more clearly modeled features,
belonged to Germany's upper class.

Shriek!  The train plunged into a cutting ending in a tunnel of sheer
blackness.  Bursting, with another shriek, into the light of day, she
raced for a while neck-and-neck with a cavalry-train.  They were Red
Dragoon Guards and White Cuirassiers of the Great Headquarters Staff,
and they exchanged cheers and sharp, staccato shouts of "_Hurrah,
Preussen!_" with the infantry of the Guard, as the latter were
hurried by.

Nothing was left to Chance.  All was deadly, methodical accuracy.
The keen, clear brain under Moltke's wig controlled the speed of
every train upon the six Rhine and Moselle railways over which the
Army of United Germany was rolling to inundate France.

Trains, trains, trains!

Trains of trucks, laden with gabions woven of split beech-saplings,
with oaken lascines and bales of empty earth-bags.  Commissariat
trains of wagons packed with sheep and cattle, and the ubiquitous pig
of the Fatherland.  Coffee-and-sugar trains, trains of pea-sausage
and the rock-hard brown biscuit wherewith "Our Moltke" fed his
soldier men.  Trains of spare arms, clothing, trenching-tools and
cooking-utensils; trains of cartridges, gunpowder, blasting-powder,
solid shot, shrapnel, and the big projectiles destined for the
siege-guns; with trains upon trains close-packed with the men who
were to use these things,--took precedence or gave it, because the
withered finger beckoned or waved....

"Our Moltke," so mild and affable and courteous, truly, when the
Genius that possessed thee spread his steely wings and soared, thou
wert a very terrible old man, or so it seems to me.


The descriptive article laid by, you found P. C. Breagh, in the
interests of Mr. Knewbit, studying his fellow-travelers.  The
weak-eyed, spectacled young soldier on his left-hand, whose fingers
were burned and yellow-stained, as though their owner had dabbled in
chemical experiments, and who had remained mute as a fish throughout
the journey, only opening his mouth to eat or drink, or reply to a
remark addressed to him by a non-commissioned officer, was reading
the "Iliad" of Homer in the original, from a little parchment-bound,
Amsterdam-printed Elzevir edition, that he seemed to cherish as the
apple of one of his short-sighted eyes....  A handsome young bugler
in the next compartment had a well-thumbed copy of "The Pickwick
Papers."  The huge tanned Guardsman on his right, whose broad breast
displayed the medals of 1866 and of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign,
and whose powerful bass notes had reverberated through the diaphragm
of his neighbor when he sang, was chatting with a younger comrade who
sat opposite.  Holding the well-greased unburnished needle-gun
between their solid thighs--to hang the silver-spiked Guard's helmet
on the muzzle seemed a popular way of disposing of the
headpiece--they exchanged experiences in a genial roar, subdued to a
growl at confidential passages.

"Grete came to the Barracks to bid me God-speed....  There were a few
tears--dried when I promised to bring her a wedding-gift from Paris.
Thou seest, she is going to turn over a new leaf, and get married to
a waiter at a Sommer-garten--a club-footed man who is not called upon
to serve--being on the Exempt List."

They guffawed at the picture of the happy bridegroom.  Said the
senior, wiping his overflowing eyes with a hand as brown and broad as
an undersized flitch of bacon:

"I looked up 'Mina in the Landsberger-Strasse.  She could not meet
me, as her old woman had a betrothal-party for one of her daughters.
A young student from a Conservatoire, in a tail-coat three sizes too
small for him, and a pair of linen cuffs as big as starched
table-napkins, was the victim served up.  I saw him as 'Mina carried
in the spiced wine and rum-punch, and a longer pair of lantern-jaws I
never saw.  But when they sat down to table, and I took another peep
through the door-crack, I promise you those jaws of his were grinding
away like steam!"

"Nu, but the punch?" asked the other Guardsman.

"_Sapperlot!_--do you suppose I went without my whack of it?--and
'Mina's eyes as red as preserved cherries with crying about my going
to the War?  I had had a mug of the good stuff, and a bottle of
something or other!--gilt paper on the neck of it--nothing at all but
fizzle inside.  Then I settled down to a jug of cool beer and the
breast of a turkey, while 'Mina was waiting on the parlor-folks.
Heard her step coming along the passage--thought I'd play the fool
with her a bit--so I turned the kitchen-gas low and hid behind the
door.  In she comes!--I'd got my arms round her and kissed her--a
regular juicy smack or two, before--by the yell she gave!--I knew it
wasn't 'Mina at all...."

"_Potzblitz!_ who was it, then?"

"Who but the old woman?  But for the thumping size of the waist I'd
squeezed, and the taste of violet-powder in my mouth, I might have
thought I'd got hold of one of the young Fräuleins.  'Help, murder,
thieves!' cried she.  'How dare you insult a respectable mother of a
family!  Give your name, you rogue, or I'll have in the
police!'--'Don't do that,' says I.  'I'm only 'Mina's
brother--dropped in to take leave before going to the War!'--'A fine
brother!' says she.  'Do brothers hug their sisters in that bearish
way?  Be off with you quick march! and think yourself lucky to escape
so easily!'..."  He wound up: "But if she had reported me to the
_Herr Oberst Leutnant_, nothing much would have come of it.  He'd
have said: '_Was sol Ich!_--but we're off to the War!'"

A sentence or so more, and the conversation resolved itself into
strong tobacco-smoke.  Twilight was fading into dusk.
Dortmund--Elberfeld--Düsseldorf had paid tribute of beers, cheers,
and tears to the defenders of German Unity, the most inveterate
songsters and conversationalists were getting sleepy, and it would be
midnight before the troop-train, traveling, like the others that
followed it, at a speed strictly calculated to permit of the somewhat
slower transit of six supplementary trains bearing the King and his
Great Headquarter Staff--could reach Cologne.

The lamps, adding the flavor of hot kerosene to the conglomeration of
odors--had been lighted at Düsseldorf.  The tobacco-reek had grown so
dense that below their band of yellow light was a sharply defined
band of opaque blue fog, in which medium colors were neutralized to
monochrome, and outlines of sleeping, or chatting, or card-playing,
or reading soldiers blurred into vagueness, wavered, and were blotted
out for P. C. Breagh in a sudden doze.


He wakened at a late hour, to the iron measure clanked and ground and
beaten out by couplings and brakes, wheels and axles.  Snores of all
kinds--from the shrill clarionet-note of the spectacled student of
Homer to the deep 'cello-bass of the Guardsman who had hugged 'Mina's
mistress in mistake for his sweetheart--resounded on all sides; the
tobacco-fog had somewhat thinned.

Finding it possible to move, because his burly neighbor was soundly
sleeping, pillowed upon the body of the man upon his right hand, P.
C. Breagh yawned--recovered his knapsack, which had slipped from his
knees to a floor which in point of cleanliness left much to be
desired, removed from it with a fragment of newspaper the worst
impurities it had contracted by contact, threw the newspaper out of
the nearest window and, in the performance of this act, caught a not
unfriendly eye.

Its owner, a huge young man, who, occupying a place on the end of the
same seat, had been hitherto screened by the body of the huger
private who had kissed not wisely, said, and in English of the Oxford
brand:

"You find our men lacking in good manners?  Yet there is much
spitting on the part of English soldiers, when they are standing at
ease, or off duty.  I have myself observed this."

"Then you know England?" P. C. Breagh interrogated, and the private,
who was very tall, very blond, very broad-shouldered,
straight-featured, blue-eyed, and small-waisted, answered:

"Pretty well.  I have a relative who married a lady who is your
countrywoman.  I have been the guest of her family at their London
house.  You speak our language, for I have heard you.  And with a
North Prussian accent, by the way."

P. C. Breagh returned:

"I spent three years at Schwärz-Brettingen.  With the sole result
that I can make myself understood by Germans who don't speak English.
And that I owe to my landlady."

Said the Guardsman, yawning and smiling:

"My father sent me to Oxford.  Three terms have yielded this
result,--that I can converse with Englishmen who know German.  Thanks
to a charming young lady, a niece of the relative I spoke of just
now, who was so good as to read the poems of Tennyson with me.  'The
Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' and 'Maud,' were her chief favorites--I
preferred his epics founded on the Arthurian legend.  Though my
charming English cousin was often vexed with me for saying that our
Wagner's verse-drama of the Nibelungen-Ring possessed far truer
inspiration, and that 'Die Walküre' and 'Tristan' would have been
finer than anything Tennyson has ever written,--had they existed
simply as poems, and never been wedded to music at all.  At that the
young English lady was angry; she said things to me in her
indignation which were terrible; but she forgave me, because I was
compelled to leave the University and return to Germany to put in my
term of service as a private, before I present myself as a candidate
for an officer's silver sword-knot in the usual course of things.
You are, perhaps, acquainted with our German methods of qualifying
for a Commission?  Bismarck has two sons serving as troopers with the
1st Dragoon Guards; whereas a private of Ours is a nephew of
Moltke's, and two or three others are cadets of princely
families--representatives of what your countrymen would call the
'aristocracy of Germany.'  Perhaps one or two of them will find that
silver sword-knot they are looking for--across the frontier,
somewhere between the Rhine and the Moselle!..."

"When do you think there will be fighting?"

Inexpressibly P. C. Breagh yearned to know when and where the dance
was expected to begin.  But his eagerness seemed to freeze the
loquacious Guardsman, whose blue eyes narrowed, whose smile
stiffened, whose smooth voice instantly diverted the current of the
talk to other things:

"Were you at the Gala Performance at the Opera, the night before
last?  Delphine Zucca could hardly sing; her husband, young Baron von
Bladen, of the Jastrow Hussars, has been appointed first galloper on
the Staff of General Manteuffel, Chief of the First Corps, First
Army.  So the Zucca is naturally inconsolable, as they've only been
married a month.  But Elise Hahn-Tieck, as the Genius of United
Germany, in a corslet of gilt chain-mail, and a helmet crested with
oak-boughs, with a green Rhine meandering over her white muslin robe,
was tremendous when she came down to the center of the stage to sing
'_Die Wacht am Rhein_,'---carrying our East Prussian Flag and the
banner of the Hohenzollern, and followed by other operatic actresses
in character as the Auxiliary States.  _Sapperlot_!  When she drew
her sword, she was tremendous!  And when she fell upon her knees, the
big chandelier in the auditorium jumped.  She sang the part of
_Gretchen_ last season, and looked not much over thirty.  Make-up,
because, you know, she has a grandson who is a junior-lieutenant in
the Duke of Coburg's Regiment of White Cuirassiers, and must be sixty
if she's a day.  _Prime donne_ are like wines, no good till they've
arrived at a ripe old age.  Though I could introduce you to a little
girl of eighteen or so, just now doing a song-and-dance at the
Schützen-Strasse Tingel-Tangel, who has a voice that pleases me
better than the warblings of any of the highly paid Opera House
nightingales.  And what a figure! round and tempting and seductive.
And such arms, and--_Sapperlot!_--what a pair of legs!"

Thus prattled the twenty-year-old sprig of German aristocracy, to the
other youngster, his senior in years if his junior in knowledge of
the world.  He went on in his Oxford English:

"Not that I'm inclined to ruin myself for women, though I must say a
good many pretty ones have been uncommonly kind to me.  That sort of
thing runs in my family, though! and I ought to be obliged to my
Cousin Max for dying a bachelor.  Killed himself in '66 about a
mistress who was playing the double game.  A regular French
adventuress, diabolically handsome, who eloped with him when he was
_attaché_ of our Prussian Embassy at Paris in '57, and has a husband
living, they say.  Colossal impudence--actually passes herself off as
my cousin's widow, in society of a certain sort.  So, out of the
desire to deal Madame Venus a slap in the face, I got a comrade who
knew her, to introduce me at a festive supper-party....  Said he:
'Countess von Schön-Valverden, permit me to present my most intimate
friend,' and reels off my name.  Would you believe it, the woman
never turned a hair.  It was I who got flustered when she stared me
in the face.  Colossal coolness--I can hear her now, lisping: '_The
Herr Count is doubtless a relative of my poor, dear Maximilian!  Even
had he not borne the name, I should have been struck by his
resemblance to my beloved lost one._'  And then I got out, not half
as cleverly as I had planned it: 'And even had you borne the name
that is your own, Madame, I should have been shot through the heart
by the beauty that has already proved fatal to one member of my
family!'"  He added, "I laid an emphasis on those four words, '_shot
through the heart_,' because my unlucky cousin actually met his death
after that fashion....  Will you have a cigar of mine?  They are
better than the weeds our patriotic friends have bestowed on us."

P. C. Breagh accepted a smooth light-hued Havana from the offered
case, asking with interest, due to the lurid flare of tragedy in the
background of the other's lively chatter: "And the lady of the
Venusberg--how did she take your reference to her past?"

The Guardsman, cigar in mouth, stopped in the act of striking a
fusee-match to answer: "She took it--as a woman of Madame de Bayard's
stamp might be expected to.  With a _sangfroid_ that one could only
admire somewhat less than her superb skin and hair, her shape of a
goddess and her marvelous eyes--almost the color of Brazilian
tourmaline."  He sent out a spiral of fragrant brownish-blue smoke
and added: "Had I actually stood four years ago in the shoes which I
have legally inherited, I'll be hanged if I'd have shot myself and
left her to my rival.  For the other was at Schönfeld--actually in
the house, you must know!--when Cousin Max came home on leave.  Hence
the tragedy at three o'clock in the morning.  Such a depressing hour
to commit suicide.  Now, had it been after supper..."

He shrugged, and sent out another spiral of cigar-smoke, and,
perceiving that his whilom listener heard no longer, ceased to talk.

The while P. C. Breagh plunged into a brown-study by the chance
utterance of a stranger's name, and unblushingly abandoning the
effort to remain true to his gigantic type-ideal, hung fondly over
the mentally evoked image of an Infanta in miniature.

Where was Juliette de Bayard now?  Had the outbreak of war hastened
or delayed her marriage with the happy master of swordsmanship?
And--worshiping her father as Monica had said she did--how had she
borne the parting from him?

She would be very calm....  P. C. Breagh pictured the little face
drawn and pinched with misery; saw the sapphire eyes dimmed with
tears unshed, imagined the slender throat convulsed with sobs that
were kept resolutely back, heard the silver-flute voice saying:

"My father has honored me with his confidence as long as I can
remember, sir!" and, "See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I
will not be trusted at all!"

Strange that his elfin queen--his carved ivory Princess--should bear
the same name as the woman the Guardsman had gossiped of--the
beautiful, evil creature with the eyes like Brazilian tourmalines.
And, what particular color in Brazilian tourmalines might have been
intended?  Some were purple, others pink, and yet others
reddish-brown.  The woman who had dropped her parasol on the
staircase at the Chancellor's had had eyes of tawny wine-color.  With
the remembrance, came back the perfume shaken from her rustling silks
and laces, and the languid echo of her caressing voice.


Drowsiness came next, and then oblivion, in heavy slumber.  And, as
the unconscious form of P. C. Breagh lapsed this way and that, and
his chin burrowed deeper into his bosom, the Sergeant who occupied
the corner-seat facing the sleeper,--shading his eyes from the
lamplight with a broad brown hand that wore a thick silver wedding
ring upon the little finger, lowered the hand, and, leaning forward,
stared in the young man's unconscious face, with small, suspicious,
unwinking eyes.  Now the eyes looked round so sharply, that every
waking man in the compartment, save the blue-eyed patron of the
Tingel-Tangel girl, found it necessary to assume the appearance of
slumber, and the Sergeant's voice said hoarsely:

"Private von Valverden!"

"At your service, _Herr_ Sergeant."

"Private von Valverden, is this one, then, an Englishman?"

"Undoubtedly, _Herr_ Sergeant!"

"_Gut!_" said the Sergeant.  "But what is his calling?  Is he of the
newspaper-offices that he sits and scribbles so?"

"That question I cannot answer, Herr Sergeant, but if he be on the
staff of any paper, he cannot accompany us without a _Legitimation_,
and a letter from someone in authority."

The Sergeant sucked in his bearded lips, and rolled his sharp little
eyes more suspiciously than ever.  Valverden went on:

"Doubtless he has them--I saw him show a paper to the Halt Commandant
at Berlin, and the _Herr_ Colonel himself spoke to him and told him
he might travel as far as Bingen by this train.  And I happen to know
that four London newspaper correspondents have been accredited by the
King upon the instance of Count Bismarck; one being appointed to
accompany the Crown Prince, another being permitted to accompany the
Second Army, while two are attached to the Great Headquarter Staff."

The Sergeant said, glancing at the unconscious slumberer:

"_Gut, gut!_ but is this fellow one of them?"

"If he be not, _Herr_ Sergeant, he will get no farther than Bingen,
for doubtless the Commandant there will be on the lookout for persons
whose credentials are not of the best."

The Sergeant shook his head vigorously, wrinkling up his full-bearded
countenance suspiciously:

"And suppose the Commandant is not on the lookout, Private von
Valverden?  See you, I have had my suspicions since yesterday, and I
tell you..."




XXXII

Every waking ear in the neighborhood, and there were now a good many,
pricked with curiosity as the Sergeant half-rose, and, inclining his
inflamed countenance and bearded lips toward the ear of his selected
confidant, continued in a hoarse rumbling undertone:

"Two of those _verdammte_ English newspaper-scribblers that have got
on the blind side of Their Excellencies and His Majesty the
Commander-in-Chief were at the station at Berlin picking up
information the very day we entrained.  Well do I know that paunchy
little one with the big beard, who has, they say, as many Orders as a
Field-Marshal, and who will venture to thrust himself upon Our Moltke
in his study, and accost His Excellency Count Bismarck upon the very
doorsteps of the Reichstag itself.  They got off three trains ahead
of us, paying for men and horses and trucks, to Cologne; and if this
fellow were not a knave, would he not have gone with them?  _Ach,
ja_!  It would have been so!  But they did not even know him, though
he pretended to touch his cap to them....  I tell you he turned as
red as beetroot when they passed him without a glance.  _Nu, nu!_ he
is an unlicensed meddler, if not a French spy, speaking English.  Do
they not teach it at their Lycées?  And he has got on the blind side
of the Commandant at Berlin and the _Herr_ Colonel.  But I, Sergeant
Schmidt, have my weather-eye open, and it sticks in my gizzard that
our so-glorious Moltke, let alone His Majesty, should with so much
civility these quill-driving vagabonds encourage; when they say the
French Emperor has given orders that, should the like of them about
the heels of his Army Corps be caught sniffing, they are to be shot."

"Possibly the Napoleon has more deficiencies to be ashamed of than we
have, _Herr_ Sergeant!"

Taking a deep breath, the Sergeant blew himself out to the utmost of
his capacity and bellowed:

"_Himmeldonnerwetter!_ are you going to insinuate in my presence that
the Prussian Army has anything at all to be ashamed of?  Now you've
waked this rascal with your racket, maybe you'll sit on his head
while I go through his pockets.  Here, Braun and Kleiss, catch hold
of his arms and legs!"

Waking in the chiaroscuro of the smoke-filled, lamplit troop-carriage
to find himself in the brawny grip of the aforesaid Braun and Kleiss,
P. C. Breagh fought for freedom, yelling as one possessed, and
lashing out with all his might.  In the heat of the scrimmage that
followed, as a muscular arm in a coarse blue sleeve came round his
neck from behind and choked him into silence, somebody said in his
ear:

"Keep still ... not hurt you!  Only going ... search!"

And before he had rallied his wits sufficiently to realize that the
warning was in English, a pair of extra-sized hands had deftly
emptied the pockets of the old brown Norfolk jacket, relieved him of
the cherished binoculars, a brand-new revolver, and a purse and
letter-case that had been hidden in his bosom next the skin.  Then, a
soiled newspaper having been spread upon the carriage-bench and the
pieces of conviction arranged upon it, Sergeant Schmidt, surrounded
by an audience of admiring inferiors, commenced to interrogate their
owner:

"What is this?"  He held up the well-used briar-root.  "A pipe, and
yet it might be used to conceal dispatches or tracings.  A pistol
also.  On the principle of the French mitraille, with many barrels.
Prisoner, answer!  Where did you get this?"

Returned P. C. Breagh, scarlet and breathing shortly:

"I bought it in Berlin from a pawnbroker in the Landsberger-strasse.
By what right..."

Someone behind hacked him on the ankle, driving home the axiom that
silence was wisdom, and he subsided, boiling within, as the Colt, a
nearly brand-new six-barreled weapon, seen and purchased, together
with its box of three hundred cartridges, for seven of P. C. Breagh's
cherished sovereigns, was laid by, while the Sergeant, breathing
stertorously, examined the contents of the purse.  He snorted,
letting the bright coins run through his greedy fingers like yellow
water:

"Nine pieces of gold.  French coins, too, or call me a sheepshead!"

"At your service, Herr Sergeant," put in the smooth, well-bred voice
of Valverden, following on the ominous murmur that had greeted the
Sergeant's announcement; "the money is as English as this revolver is
American.  Prove the first for yourself.  When has the French Emperor
figured in a woman's hair and _corsage_?"

A guffaw went up.  P. C. Breagh, recognizing the voice which had
spoken from behind him, realized that here was a friend in need.  But
an attempt at speech on his part was frustrated by an ominous
tightening of the muscular arm that had previously half-strangled
him.  The Sergeant, his fiery pot-zeal rather damped by frequent
set-backs, snapped-to the purse and said, keeping it tucked in one
capacious palm, as he shook out the contents of the letter-case:

"_So_!  He is cunning, like many another of his kidney.  Yet it may
be here is proof sufficient to show him a rogue!  Who here reads
French?"

"I do, _Herr_ Sergeant."  Once again the well-bred voice of
Valverden.  The Sergeant grunted surlily:

"There is another here ... Private Kunz!"

The spectacled soldier who read Homer in the original, and who had
been violently displaced when the muscular Braun and the athletic
Kleiss had obeyed the order to pinion the suspected one, shot bolt
upright in his distant corner, saluted and said in a meek voice:

"At your service, _Herr_ Sergeant!"

"Private Kunz, canst thou read French?"

"_Zu befehl, Herr_ Sergeant!"  The spectacled private added as the
Sergeant passed him over the contents of the letter-case: "But these
letters are not in French.  Two are in English, and one is in German."

The Sergeant scowled and thundered:

"Thou art an ass!"

"At your service, Herr Sergeant," mildly agreed the spectacled
soldier, "but Private Count von Schön-Valverden, who understands the
French and English languages, will corroborate my statement if you
will kindly refer to him."

"'Kindly refer.' ... 'Corroborate my statement.' ..."  The Sergeant,
purple in the gills, and with bolting eyes, loosened his collar-hook
before he launched into profanity: "_Potzblitz_!  Never did I meet
with language to equal thine.  What wert thou as a civilian before
thou didst enter the Army?"

"Graduate of the University of Würzburg, _Herr_ Sergeant," faltered
the spectacled Guardsman, "and _Privat-docent_ in Chemistry and
Philosophy.  Occupying the post of assistant to Herr Weber,
Dispensing Chemist, of Strahlsund, near Stettin."

"_Sehrgut_, Private Kunz," said the Sergeant, conscious of the grins
lurking behind the respectful faces about him.  "Tell us plainly, and
without lying or skipping, what are these papers the fellow has got
on him?  Put him back on the seat, Braun and Kleiss, and sit on
either side, each taking a wing.  Now, Kunz, do thou begin!"

And the little sheaf that had been transferred from the horny
clutches of the Sergeant, to the yellow-stained sensitive-looking
fingers of the chemist's assistant, was subjected to the scrutiny of
the weak eyes behind his large round spectacles, as sleepy-looking
Westphalian villages of cottages with tall tiled roofs, grouped about
squat, low-spired churches; and leagues of rye and barley, almost
ready for the sickle, streamed by the half-glazed windows, all black
in shadow and white in the clear, pure radiance of August's crescent
moon.

_Item_, a worn letter in English handwriting of the legal kind, dated
in the January previous, and directed to P. C. Breagh, Esq., Care of
Frau Busch, Jaeger-strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen.  _Item_, a passport
issued some ten days previously, to the same person on application at
the London Foreign Office, on disbursement of the sum of Two
Shillings, and authorizing him, on payment of the proper dues and at
his own risk, to proceed _via_ Ostend to Berlin.  _Item_, another
passport, procured as a last resource--granting the said P. C. Breagh
permission on the part of the Berlin Foreign Office, and as a
strictly non-combatant British subject, to transfer himself, _via_
Belgium and Luxembourg, to French territory.  Lastly, a half-sheet of
tough Chancellory note-paper, covered with the large, closely-set,
vigorous handwriting of the man who was meant when newspaper-editors
and politicians, diplomats and monarchs, guttersnipes and generals,
talked of Prussia.  What would happen when that came under the
spectacles of the ex-chemist's assistant?  P. C. Breagh thirsted to
know.

What happened was, that the Sergeant, rendered impatient by delay on
the part of the spectacled one, grabbed at the documents and dropped
them on the unclean floor.  The half-sheet of Chancellory note was
picked up by Valverden.  He gave it one glance and said, smoothly and
with an indefinable change in the tone of the voice that P. C. Breagh
had thought so friendly:

"I would put this paper back with the rest and return them to their
owner, Herr Sergeant, and prosecute no further inquiries, if I were
you."

"_Nu_? ... _Was_?  I cannot read the crabbed stuff that is written
and printed on the other papers," grunted the Sergeant.  "But this
seems wholesome German....  What says it, then?  Tell us, you, since
that _gimpel_ in glasses can make nothing of it, for all his brag."

Valverden obeyed and read:

"_The bearer of this is an Englishman, named Patrick Carolan Breagh,
speaking German with a slight accent.  Height five feet nine inches,
age 23.  Hair reddish and curling, complexion fresh, much freckled.
Short, straight nose, gray eyes with dots of yellow, chin square,
slightly cleft.  Further his desire to proceed with our troops, if
possible.  I can personally vouch for his honesty and good faith._

[Illustration: signature of Otto von Bismarck]

  "BERLIN,
    "_July_, 1870."




XXXIII

P. C. Breagh never heard the order given, but next moment his aching
wrists were released from the huge, hard grip of Privates Braun and
Kleiss, and the muscular legs that had affectionately twined about
his own, were withdrawn.  Subsequently, singly, and in silence, the
Sergeant handed back the watch, pipe, tobacco-pouch, purse, and
note-case.  Last of all, Valverden, making a long arm, returned the
half-sheet of Chancellory note, bearing the signature that had worked
the miracle, without words, and looking coldly in its owner's face.

"Thanks tremendously! ... I've no doubt I'm to blame for not
producing my credentials earlier," said Carolan.  "But I'd no notion
of the rather serious turn things were going to take.  However, all's
well that ends----"

His smile froze upon his lips, and died out of his eyes as he
encountered the stare the other turned upon him, answering haughtily:

"I regret that you have suffered some rough handling from my
comrades, under the wrong impression that you were an agent of the
French Secret Service.  Admitting that our own side act advisedly in
employing persons like you, I must say that to me, personally, a spy
is--a spy!"

"But, hang it! you don't suppose----" Carolan choked out after a
moment of angry bewilderment.  And with the Sergeant's piggish little
eyes curiously fixed on him, Valverden answered curtly:

"I suppose nothing.  Excuse me from further conversation."


The revolver with its cartridges had not been returned with the other
articles.  Its owner asked the Sergeant for it, getting in reply only
a glare.  Thenceforward the long night's journey for one traveler was
performed in unbroken silence.  P. C. Breagh had been dispatched to
Coventry by one and all.

Men who conversed spoke in barely-audible whispers, their covert
glances, like the frigid indifference of Valverden's regard, and the
extra six inches of seat-space accorded to the holder of the States
Chancellor's written guarantee, testified to the aroma of suspicion
that personage's document exhaled.

So at breathless, baking midnight the troop-train clanked into
Cologne, no longer throbbing with the beat of drums, roaring with
iron-shod wheels, swarming with men in brass-spiked helmets, choked
with continuously shouting patriots, as it had been a few hours
earlier when the Headquarter Staff trains had passed through,--and in
the close, gray dawn of a thundery day, jolted into Bingen.

Here miles of rolling-stock and numberless engines blocked up the
metal roads.  Shuttered windows and barricaded doors testified that
house-owners had temporarily abandoned their property.  Strings of
barges, laden with Commissariat stores and live-stock, were being
towed up the Rhine by the gaily painted, white-awninged, paddle-wheel
steamers familiar to the British tourist, while others were conveying
voluntarily exiled residents and fugitive visitors down the classic
stream out of harm's way.

Conveyance by railway--of a kind--was to be had upon terms
prohibitory to all but the opulent.  And disheveled ladies, pale or
red with panic, besieged the station-master and his master, the Halt
Commandant--with prayers, commands and entreaties, for places, but
for places on some Northward-going train....


Something was in the air besides the short, staccato bugle-calls, the
scream of signal-whistles and the ceaseless beating of the Prussian
side-drums.  P. C. Breagh knew it, even as a tall, lean, red-faced
Inspector caught his eye and beckoned him imperiously to quit his
cage, asking:

"You have a _Legitimation_ to proceed with the troops to Kreuznach?
No?  Then be good enough to stand aside until I have an opportunity
of ascertaining why you were originally permitted.  Here is the
Commandant."

Standing on the whitewashed platform, hot, dusty, unbrushed and
unwashed, burdened with his unstrapped knapsack, a stout
walking-stick, a leather-covered, screw topped sling water-bottle,
some crumpled newspapers and a package of solid sandwiches--thrust
upon him at one of the previous stopping-places, P. C. Breagh was
conscious of cutting a sorry figure.  Conscious, too, of Valverden's
supercilious eye-glass, glittering a few yards off, as he stretched
his long legs on the platform and talked eagerly with some comrades
of his own standing, straight-backed, long-legged youngsters, with
arrogant manners, clear eyes, budding mustaches, newly fledged
whiskers, broad shoulders and regulation waists.

No new pupil at a young ladies' boarding school, smarting under the
double stigma of plainness and poverty, no cheaply arrayed debutante
at a suburban subscription-ball, ever blushed more hotly or winced
more painfully under the scrutiny of prettier and richer girls, than
did P. C. Breagh under the glances of these young men.

Not the memory of the Army Service examinations he had failed in
galled him, or that missed shot for the I.C.S., or the University
career foregone.  It was the word "spy" that rankled in his memory
and took the starch out of his self-conceit.

Before the discovery of the Minister's written guarantee, Valverden
had gossiped with him as an equal--the other Guardsmen had been
friendly in their rougher way.  The fateful half-sheet of Chancellory
note had changed everything.  "As though one had blossomed out in
plague or smallpox," P. C. Breagh had said to himself bitterly.  "And
I feel like a kind of Ali Baba or somebody, whose talisman would only
work upside down!"

Even his parting salute had met with grudging acknowledgment.  The
Sergeant had grunted.  Braun and Kleiss had spat, and looked the
other way.  Valverden's finger had barely brushed the narrow peak of
his forage-cap.  Only Kunz, the spectacled ex-chemist's assistant,
had civilly bidden the parting guest good-day.

He was horribly sore at the treatment received from Valverden.
Susceptible of hero-worship, warm and sincere in feeling, he had
taken a liking to the brilliant youngster, three years his junior,
his superior in social status and in cynical knowledge of the world.
Was it disgraceful to belong to the Prussian Diplomatic Secret
Intelligence Department, that ramifying spider-web of invisible
wires, reaching to the uttermost Kingdoms of the civilized globe, and
emanating from the Chancellory in the Friedrichstrasse, Berlin?

The Army had its secret agents, an army of them, by Jingo!  Had not
scraps of conversation reached the ears of P. C. Breagh no later than
the previous day, relative to a certain dandy Colonel of Prussian
Field Artillery, who for the past two years had filled the well-paid
post of lace and ribbon Department Manager at the Paris Bon Marche.

Then why on earth....  But at this juncture the Halt Inspector
returned with the Commandant, a white-whiskered, potty officer, in
blue infantry uniform with distinctive white shoulder-straps, beside
whom stalked a tall, middle-aged Colonel of Uhlans, whose pale eyes,
unshaded by the tufted schlapka, glittered through steel-rimmed
glasses, whose teeth were clenched on a familiar meerschaum--and
whose gaunt, broad-shouldered figure looked better in the dark blue
cavalry uniform with its yellow plastron and white cross-belt, than
in Herr von Rosius's Berlin-made private clothes.

For it was undoubtedly Miss Ling's quiet-mannered first-floor lodger,
who had resigned his post of teacher at the Berners Street Institute
of Languages when the wire had come from Headquarters, bidding him
come back and be a cog-wheel in Moltke's big war-machine.  What Mr.
Knewbit would have called "the blank expression" appeared behind his
spectacles when they showed him his young fellow-lodger from Coram
Street.  But he paused when the Commandant halted and began to ask
questions--which Carolan answered in the German so frequently tested
on Herr von Rosius.

"How came you to travel from Berlin in a train set apart for the use
of the Guard Infantry?  Show me your _Legitimations-Kart_ and
military ticket, if you have one!--You have neither? ... Then how did
you, against the regulations, obtain permission of the authorities to
enter a _militär-zug_?  It is inconceivable that you should have
managed to conceal yourself without connivance of some kind!"

Things were getting close to the Chancellory half-sheet, but it would
never be displayed with the consent of P. C. Breagh.  He had wild
ideas of feigning idiocy, of appealing to Von Rosius, but the first
resource savored of the theater too strongly for adoption, and the
second--one glance at the hard, ignoring eyes behind the steel-rimmed
glasses disposed of that for good.


At his wits' end, a loud, genial voice hailed him in the English
language, flavored with the County Dublin brogue.

"By the powers! and there's the face I'm looking for.  Longer by a
yard than it was when you capped me at Berlin.  Faith! and I stared
at you with all my eyes, wondering where in the world I'd last beheld
ye?  Till Chris Brotherton quizzed me and I bet him five shillings
the place was Fleet Street.  Now, on your honor, was it?  Speak, or
forever after hold your tongue!"

"Not quite Fleet Street, sir, but hardly a stone's throw from it!"  A
great wave of unreasonable hope lifted the sinking heart of P. C.
Breagh.

The big, warm voice and the kind, bright glance that had wrought the
miracle, belonged to a stout little bearded gentleman of fifty,
topped with a hard gray Derby, and attired in a pepper-and-salt
cutaway coat, brown holland vest and neat white hunting-stock, gray
Bedford cords and shiny black spurred Blucher boots.  Had you met him
cantering on some plump and well-fed cob along a green lane in the
Mother Country, you would have taken him--but for the revolver-pouch
that depended from a neat black leather belt, and the wallet that,
with its companioning field-glass, was slung across his
shoulders--for a hard-riding country surgeon or solicitor, of the
good old English kind.  But P. C. Breagh knew better, and his drab
world changed to rose-color, as the big voice rolled from the
capacious chest:

"Hardly a minute's ... Hold on!  For the life of you, don't refresh
my memory!  What would it be to find one's mental legs getting shaky
at the start of a new campaign!  Not a stone's throw from Fleet
Street, did you say? ... By the Beadle of Old Trinity! if you don't
mean the Maze at Hampton Court or the Nevski Prospect at Petersburg,
or the garden of the Dilkusha at Lucknow, you're talking of Printing
House Square!  Am I right now?"

"You've hit the nail, sir!  You were walking arm-in-arm with Mr.
Sala--and I'd been introduced to him before, luckily! and he
remembered my name and presented me to you!"

"And I'm five shillings the richer by the meeting.  For if Chris
Brotherton dares to say the _Thunderbolt_ office and Fleet Street are
anything but synonymous, he's a bolder man than I take him to be.
But I'm interrupting a conversation...."  He broke off, saluting the
official.  "Pray accept my apologies, _Herr_ Commandant, I'll wait
while you finish with my young friend."

The Commandant stiffly returned the genial salute before he wheeled
and walked off with the Inspector and Von Rosius, who, while the king
of British War Correspondents chatted with his glowing vassal, had
exchanged a few sentences with these personages apart.  Then said the
kindly little gentleman, with a humorous twirl of the eye at the
three:

"I claimed your acquaintance because I saw you nearing the jaws of a
German guardroom.  Though I fancy you'd a friend at Court in that
Uhlan Colonel there! ... I heard him tell the Commandant that he'd no
earthly idea how you got here, but you were simply an English
schoolboy who was crazy to see a war.  And the Commandant said
something about turning tail at the first whistle of a
_Bombensplitter_--that's a shell-splinter.  Though I'm pretty certain
by the cut of your jib you'd do nothing of the kind!"

He added, as a familiar shout of "Entrain!" and a bugle-call brought
the platform leg-stretchers scampering to their places and the long
train of gray-painted wagons, officers' horse-boxes and baggage
trucks, clanked into motion again:

"Your friends of the Guard have gone without you.  Kreuznach will be
their detraining-point--that's all I can tell you.  For the
reason--and it's an uncommonly sound one!--that the newly mobilized
men of the infantry battalions want a march to limber their joints
and stretch their new boots a bit.  Begad! my own brogues would be
the better of a day or two on the trees.  But rheumatism and corns
are the price one pays for experience--and the privilege of talking
like a daddy to harum-scarum gossoons like yourself.  You've no
business to be here, boyo! but since you are--use your eyes and
brains to observe with--never be ashamed of running away when you can
get out of danger by doing it! and for your mother's sake, if she's
living--don't be dragged into fighting on a side.  Forget that you
have a revolver, if that bulge under your jacket means that you carry
one,--and keep your temper cool and your opinions strictly neutral,
if a fellow with a drop of Irish blood in him can!  Twit me with Bull
Run, now, and you'll get the historic answer: 'Do as I advise you to
do, not what I do!'"

He pulled out the battered gold hunting-watch at the end of its
short, strong leather guard, and glanced at it, saying with a sigh of
relief:

"Seven o'clock.  Breakfast ought to be ready at the Victoria--barrack
of a hostelry, packed with cocky Prussian officers.  Suppose you come
back there with me and have a bite and sup?"

Dazzling prospect! to a young man given to hero-worship, which the
historian of "Cromwell" had positively asserted to be good for
youthful bodies and souls.  P. C. Breagh would have given a great
deal if Valverden could have heard the invitation....  However, it
was more likely than not that he had beheld the object of his scorn
in familiar conversation with the most famous of British War
Correspondents, as the gray-painted troop-train carried him away.




XXXIV

That was an enchanted walk for P. C. Breagh, back to the big, bare,
barrack-like Victoria.  It was the Doctor's generous amends for an
unintentional slight.  Two days previously, at the Potsdam Railway
Station, Berlin, when a companion had said to him: "Who's the
enthusiastic young admirer who kowtowed to you?  English, I should
say, and you cut him unmercifully,"--he had answered, out of the
whirl of great affairs:

"I've no notion; but I'll make amends if ever he crosses my path
again.  It's not my way to hurt a boy."

"Bet you five bob he hails from Fleet Street," the friend had cried;
and the Doctor had answered:

"If so, he has a claim on me I'm not going to deny."

Dust underfoot made the tread fall as on velvet.  Dust in the air
parched the throat and got in the eyes.  And the incessant rolling of
the Prussian side-drums, lanced through with signal whistles and
sharp bugle-calls, made the hot baked atmosphere quiver, and the play
of early sunshine on myriads of brass helmet-spikes made the eyes
water and blink, as the battalions of blue infantry that had marched
into Bingen on the previous day mustered from their billets, were
entrained and conjured away; and other battalions that had marched
fifteen miles since cock-crow tramped in with the thick white dust
turned to mud upon them by the heavy Rhineland dews that had soaked
their boots and damped their uniforms, halted but to breakfast--and
were off, almost on the heels of the first.

Division after Division of Cavalry--Uhlans in light or dark blue
piped with red, and shiny black Lancer _schapkas_, Cuirassiers in
white uniforms, with steel breast and back plates, and steel helmets
simple in design as those of Cromwell's Ironsides; light blue
Dragoons, Hussars with tufted shakos of miniver, and braided jackets
of red, black, green, brown and pale blue, with their flying
batteries of Horse Artillery, their proviant columns and
ammunition-trains, had been rushed to the frontier with astounding
speed.  Now the blue deluge of marching men with needle-guns came
rolling after.  With thunder of heavy siege-trains, with patches of
green upon the monotonous blue, that stood for picked battalions of
sharpshooters; sons of gamekeepers and forest-rangers; bred from
childhood to woodcraft and hunter's lore; experts in the use of the
rifle, scouts and trackers of daring and skill.

On the seventeenth of July the Warlock had said to his King, "Give me
to the third of August and we are safe."  This was the third of
August.  And the air was thick with something besides dust.

Conscious of this, they talked, the neophyte and the adept discussing
things that had happened during the pregnant interval.  How Forbes of
the _Daily News_, who tramped it up to Saarbrück by the Nahe Valley
Road from Kreuznach, had seen the first blood flow, when a couple of
infantrymen of the garrison were brought in in a chipped condition,
having been sniped at by red-breeched French marksmen across the
frontier-line.

With a single battalion of the Hohenzollerns, the 7th Regiment of
Rhineland Uhlans had hitherto constituted Saarbrück's garrison.  And
the French being reported in force at Forbach, some fifteen or
sixteen thousand men being said to be strung out along the frontier,
a detachment of Uhlans with spare troop-horses had ridden into
Neunkirchen on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July, and borrowed
from the collieries a dozen stout miners, armed with picks, and
supplied with blasting cartridges, fuses, and so on.  These grimy
stalwarts they tied on troop-horses; crossed the frontier, and blew
up the viaduct on the railway-line branching from the Forbach-Metz
railway near Cocheren and connecting Metz with Saarguemines, Bitche,
Hagenau and Strasbourg.

Thenceafter, nothing of note happened until the twenty-eighth of
July, when the Emperor Napoleon III. entered Metz with his Staff and
the heir to the Throne Imperial, and formally took command of the
seven _corps d'armée_ known as the "Army of the Rhine."  Upon the
same day, a party of the Hohenzollerns, commanded by an N.C.O.,
reconnoitering on the right front, flushed a French _vidette_, in a
wood covering a knoll of rising ground, over the top of which went
the imaginary frontier-line.

Being shot at, the Hohenzollerns retired to garrison.  But about
regimental soup-time, twelve or thereabouts, a battery of six French
field-pieces came over the slope of the Spicherenberg heights,
getting into position on a plateau half-way down.

And while the Prussian drummers beat to arms; while the Hohenzollerns
hastily posted their four companies, one on each of the town's three
bridges, and sent one forward on the heels of a squadron of Uhlans,
up the Forbach Road, which runs through Saarbrück, rising as it
trends to the west;--while the rest of the Uhlans stood to their
horses in the Markt-platz, and the civilian population stopped to
look on, or scuttled for cover, six shells were fired, three of them
hitting a little beerhouse on the hill-brow, just off the Forbach
Road--and the Imperial cannonade was over, the artillerists retired,
and nothing more had happened,--though the _videttes_ and patrols,
Gallic and Teuton, had cracked away at each other from high noon till
batlight.


Discussing these things, the adept and the neophyte came to the
Victoria, every window of which was crowded with Prussian officers,
eating, drinking and smoking, or shouting for breakfast, coffee,
beer, wine and tobacco in every key of the human register.

Distracted waiters ran about like ants, and before the packed and
roaring caravanserai--keeping guard over one of the little decrepit
iron tables that stood under the dusty acacias--a little table that
had a fly-spotted cloth upon it, and a great glass basin filled with
sugar cubes, and was further adorned with brown rings made by the
bottoms of coffee-cups and beer-glasses, were the two friends
referred to by P. C. Breagh's Good Samaritan.

One was a handsome, fair-haired, smiling man in the scarlet,
yellow-faced, gold-adorned uniform of a crack regiment of British
Light Dragoons, "a swell of the haw-haw type" Mr. Ticking would have
termed him.  With this splendid personage, who was generally referred
to as "Major Brotherton," was a shorter, plainer individual with
fluffy whiskers, attired as for the sports of the field, in a white,
low-crowned felt, large checked tweeds, in which orange and pink
predominated, drab leggings and heavily nailed highlows.  A Dolland
field-glass was slung from his shoulders, and over a neighboring
chair lay a huge box-coat, the multitudinous pockets of which
appeared to contain his luggage, for a bath-sponge in a rubber bag
rolled out of one as he rose up to welcome the leader of the party,
and a box of areca-nut tooth-paste, and a hairbrush with a patent
collapsible handle had to be shifted before the sponge could be
replaced; just as though Mr. Toole had thought out the costume and
the comic business for some traveling Briton in a new farce.

You may suppose P. C. Breagh blushing from consciousness of the
contrast of his own travel-stained griminess with the Major's
dazzling brilliancy, when that personage shook hands with him and
said it was going to be a hot day.  Introduced by his kindly patron
to the sportsman in pink and orange tweeds with:

"Tower, this is a young countryman of mine--picked up at the
station--just tumbled out of a troop-wagon full of Guards
Infantry----"

The fluffy whiskered sportsman civilly nodded and observed: "And
dashed good luck for him!"  He added: "Doctor, if you recognized your
baggage-van by that confounded goat you've had painted on it, I'll
admit it's served some purpose besides frightening German crows!"

"Begad! it frightened me when I saw it on the siding this morning!"
avowed the genial Doctor.  "But how was I to know that the Berlin
painter who undertook to copy the crest from my family coat-of-arms
had got a magnifying eye?"

Said the man in cavalry uniform, smoothing his drooping mustache, and
speaking with the drawl of Robertsonian comedy:

"At any rate, the size of the animal testifies to the antiquity of
your race, and so on.  For in prehistoric days, I take it, goats were
as big as cows are now!"

"My thanks to you, Brotherton, for supplying so plausible an
explanation.  I'll salve my pride of pedigree with it next time I'm
taken for a traveling quack, and Prussian soldiers suffering with
indigestion apply to me for pills and black-dose."  He added, with
his pleasant laugh, catching P. C. Breagh's glance of incredulity:
"Actual fact, and no embroidery, I assure you!  You understand that
to emphasize the strictly pacific nature of my calling, I'm
exploiting my honorary degree for all it's worth!"  He added, rather
pointedly addressing the handsome cavalryman, "I've no special
ambition to be shot as a combatant!"

"Nor have I," said the man in sporting checks, warmly.  "And,
Brotherton, my dear fellow, if this 'ere 'umble individual may add
his advice to the counsel you've already had from the man, by Jove!
who of all men knows best what he's talkin' about, you'll stow that
'ere lady-killing uniform, and the silver helmet with the flowin'
plume away in some spare portmanteau, and leave 'em with your saber
and the dazzlin' horse-furniture you showed me this morning in charge
of the landlord here, until you come back from the war-path safe and
sound.  Am I talking 'oss sense, Doctor?"

"Indeed you are, Tower!" agreed the Doctor.  "And, Chris, if you'll
listen to him, I'll be eternally grateful to you, for your own sake.
You've too much of what Tower and the Yankees call 'horse sense' not
to know you're handicapped as a war correspondent by your glorious
panoply!"

The Major smiled, and said, smoothing the drooping mustache with a
fine white hand that wore a diamond-set signet:

"You can't blame me for thirsting to carry the harness I've worn in
sham fights for nearly half my lifetime, where bullets are flying in
real earnest?"

"Not a bit, dear fellow," said the Doctor, with a twinkle, "so long
as you thirst to do it and don't!  That letter 'R' on your
shoulder-cord is hardly big enough to serve as cover where those
bullets are plentiful.  And with your influence, prospects in life,
and position, you'd be an ingrate to Fate if you were anxious to die
at thirty-four."

Said Brotherton, knitting his fair eyebrows over the restless fire in
his handsome eyes:

"Influence has been my bane, and the two other things have stood in
my light ever since I was an urchin in knickerbockers.  I've been
Queen's page, and Prince's Equerry, and _aide-de-camp_ on the Duke's
Staff, and I've never seen an army in the field, or smelt powder,
except at Aldershot, or Shorncliffe, or the Curragh of Kildare, or at
carbine-practice.  What luck do you call that?"

"Dashed hard!" said Tower.

Brotherton went on:

"I was a callow cadet at Sandhurst when the Regiment covered itself
with glory at Balaclava, and as it has seen no active service
since--I've had no chance to find out whether I'm a real soldier, or
a kid-glove one."

"Why not have exchanged----" began Tower.  The Major shook his head.

"It wasn't to be done, for a very solid reason.  My father, who
served with Redlett's Brigade in the Crimea, was killed on Balaclava
Day; and I was an only son.  And my mother was a confidential
Lady-in-Waiting, and knew where to apply, by Jove! when my youthful
ambition was to be cold-watered....  And now that the dear soul has
gone, and I'm on the Retired list--after fifteen years of Windsor,
Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Pall Mall and Hyde Park--out breaks the
war that I've been sighing for.  And, after hovering about the
_Thunderbolt_ office till every printer's devil knows me by name, and
cooling my heels on the doorstep of your chambers in the Albion so
persistently that your housekeeper believed me a bailiff with a
writ--I managed to knock over Opportunity on the wing--and secured,
thanks to you, Doctor! the chance of my life!"

He stood up, a handsome, martial figure in his scarlet and golden
uniform, his eyes ablaze under the silver, gold-starred, white-plumed
helmet, his fine face flushed with the battle-lust.  And as he
stretched out his hand across the spotty tablecloth, the feasting
flies rose in a buzzing cloud.

"And glad am I if word of mine helped to get that chance for you, and
you know it, Chris, and that it's a pleasure to have you with me,"
said the genial voice, as the Doctor took the offered hand.  "But the
military array, my dear fellow!  The wampum and war-paint--that's
what I kick at, with my gouty toe of fifty-two."  He added: "But here
comes the waiter with the coffee and eggs, and bread and butter, and
something like the cold sliced ham I'm dying for--if only it doesn't
happen to be raw!  So sit down and we'll fortify ourselves against
possible short-commons at Mayence.  For that's where the King is,
with Moltke and the Great Headquarters.  And that's the destination
we take rail for at twelve noon."

He added, as Brotherton and Tower started in their chairs, and P. C.
Breagh quivered like a fox-terrier shown a rat: "As for the other
chiefs, the Red Prince is--no one seems able to tell where--and the
Crown Prince is on the frontier.  Maybe we'll hear of him at
Wissembourg by-and-by!"

"We should be there ourselves, in the thick of it," asserted
Brotherton, savagely slashing at a pallid pat of butter, as Tower
poured boiling milk and coffee into cups half-an-inch thick.

"We would be, Chris, me dear man!" said the Doctor, liberally piling
slices of cold veal and ham-sausage on his guests' plates, cutting
bread and passing the pickles, "if the authorities panted to have
English correspondents at their elbows while they're posting their
pawns and pieces for the opening game!"

Brotherton retorted with a touch of pomposity:

"You take it lightly, sir.  But for the honor of our profession, we
should extort recognition at the hands of these foreigners.  We
should, as representatives of a great Power, submit to no belittling.
Wielding as we do----"

"Keep all that toffee for the speechmaking end of a Newspaper Press
dinner, Chris, my boy," drolled the Doctor.  "Sure, 'tis we ourselves
are the foreigners here--hard as it is of conception to a true-born
Briton.  And--since we're permitted on sufferance to accompany the
forces of United Germany--the least we can do is to extract the
necessary information painlessly!"

"But, my God! when I think of what may be doing at this moment!"
broke out Brotherton, hitting the table, "I feel as if I should go
stark, staring crazy!  Have I sacrificed what I have
sacrificed--and--and borne what I have borne, to trot like a stray
tyke at the tail of a moving Army--picking up such scraps as may be
thrown me from day to day?  I tell you, sir, the mere idea is
horrible to me!  I cannot put it more mildly.  My blood is not yet
chilled by age, or my susceptibilities blunted...."  He pushed away
his plate and rose, pulling his gloves from his belt, and taking up
the cloak that had been thrown over a neighboring chair.  "I will ask
you to excuse me!  I have not yet received my papers back from the
Halt Commandant.  I will call upon him now!"

"Come with you, if you've no objection to walking in civilian
company?" said Tower, swallowing a mouthful, emptying his coffee-cup,
and reaching for the white felt hat and the box-coat.

"Come back about ten--I may have a scrap or two of news worth
hearing," said the Doctor, with imperturbable good temper; and with a
horsey touch of the hat on Tower's part, and a sulkily dignified
salute from the Major, the tall soldierly figure in its scarlet and
blue and gold, and the less dignified personality in the clothes that
might have been worn by Toole in the part of a horsey squire, went
away together, over the yellow-burnt grass and the dusty sun-baked
gravel, dotted with little breakfasting groups of officers, who had
been crowded out of the Hotel.

"I'm glad Tower's gone with him.  He's in a frame of mind that won't
make for pleasant relations with Prussian transport-officers," quoth
the Doctor, looking after the retreating couple with something like a
twinkle and something like a sigh.  "But he's a grand fellow!--a
splendid fellow is Brotherton!--even if he sometimes reminds me of
the Quaker wife who said to her husband: 'Friend Timothy, all the
world is wrong except thee and me, and thou is a little wrong
sometimes, Friend Timothy!'"

And having got rid of his vexation in one gentle gibe at the
idiosyncrasy of the petulant Brotherton, he fell to his breakfast
again, urging his guest to a renewed attack on the strong ham-sausage
and weak coffee, with the words:

"Bad policy--neglecting rations.  Must stoke when fuel for the human
engine is to be had, if you're going to chronicle the deeds of an
army that fights as it marches.  And when you've cleaned your plate,
and drunk another cup of coffee, you shall tell me why you came here
and what you want to do."

He commented, when P. C. Breagh, duly replete, had stated the nature
of his aims and ambitions; touching upon his discouragements as
briefly as might be:

"War Correspondence! ... Well, I'll admit I guessed that you'd set
your heart on something of the kind, when I saw you tumble out of
that troop-wagon with a note book sticking out of your jacket-pocket.
And so old Knewbit financed?  Sporting of him!--and he deserves that
his letters should be worth reading.  Call 'em 'Experiences of a Tyke
at the Tail of an Army.'"  He added, his bright brown eyes twinkling
through their gold-rimmed glasses.  "For that's where you've got to
be!"

He lighted a huge cigar, twisted round his green-painted iron chair
and sat astride upon it, resting on its rickety back his folded arms,
short and strong, with small muscular hands, sunburned like his
bearded face and thick bull-neck.

"I am not joking, my young acquaintance.  Can't you understand that
to keep abreast with even a secondary Staff in the war-field you have
to sweat out money at every pore?  And--without gold for transport or
thalers for _trinkgelt_--or seasoned knowledge to help you even if
your pockets were full, what can you accomplish?  I tell you
frankly--nothing at all!  But if you'll follow on the fringe of a
Division, marching with the hangers-on and officers' servants--you'll
get many a scrap of useful news and many a meaty bone of valuable
information tossed to you day by day.  And even with the rear of the
Army Corps you elect to stick to, you'll sup your fill of raw-head
and bloody bones--take the assurance from me.  Will you--with the
advice?"

The great man was so unassuming in his kindness that the little one
hardly grasped the full extent of it, even as he said, blinking as
though a cinder of the Lower Rhineland Railroad had got into his eye:

"Yes, sir, and thank you!  I shall never forget how good you've been
to me!" and got reply:

"You've no business to be here, boyo, but since you are, more by luck
than grace, use your eyes and stuff your memory with things worth
keeping.  Now as my time is precious,--is there anything more you
want to know?"

"Only one thing....  I have been puzzled by an--an incident that
happened to a--fellow in my own position."  P. C. Breagh boggled
horribly: "Was regularly set on getting to the Front--hadn't a notion
how to set about it--when he--accidentally--managed to get hold of
a--kind of official authorization.  An informal pass, certifying the
bearer as trustworthy--written and signed by Count Bismarck
himself...."

"And that wasn't half bad," the Doctor said, knocking the ash off the
huge cigar, "for a beginner pretty well, it seems to me!"

Said P. C. Breagh:

"He was tremendously elated at having got the paper.  It seemed to
smooth away every difficulty.  But later, when he found himself in
touch with Prussian Army men--they,--not only the gentlemen privates
qualifying for commissions, but the common rankers,--dropped him like
a hot potato once they knew!  And--I'd like to know the reason why
they cut me--I mean him?--because they supposed him to belong to the
Secret Intelligence Department?  '_A spy is--a spy!  Excuse me from
further conversation!_'  His mouth twisted wryly, repeating the
hateful words.

"I--understand."  The Doctor stroked his beard.  "And previously this
young Englishman and the rank-and-file of the Guard Infantry"--P. C.
Breagh kept as straight an upper-lip as was possible--"had chatted
together upon friendly terms?"

"That was it.  He had got on splendidly with them--one fellow
especially.  And--it hurt, being suddenly sent to Coventry!..."

"And does it strike you"--there was infinite sagacity in the clear
brown eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, "that if you had been
chatting freely with a supposed equal, about your own position,
prospects, and opinions, you would have 'dropped him like a hot
potato' if you had suspected him of being commissioned to sound you
for French sympathies, predilections, and so forth--on the eve of
hostilities with France?"

A light broke in upon the darkness in which Carolan had groped.  His
eyes became circular, and his mouth shaped for a whistle.  He
exploded:

"Oh, hang it!  I never thought of anything so--so beastly....  I
wondered why Valverden shied, supposing me a Secret Information
agent, when the Army has shoals of 'em....  But that Government
should set such fellows sniffing at the heels of the Army--of course
I never thought of that.  It's not--cricket, is it, sir?"

The Doctor's hearty laugh pulled round the heads of a breakfasting
party of officers not far off.  He said, lowering his voice:

"You remember the nigger's definitions of verse and prose, don't you?
'_Go up mill-dam, fall down slam! dat verse.  Go up mill-dam, fall
down whoppo, dat blank verse._'  Prussian military authority may
hold, that between spying on the enemy before the Army and spying on
the Army before the enemy, there is as little distinction.  Though
they'd think differently at the Horse Guards, thank the Lord!  By the
way, with regard to that gaunt, long-legged Lieutenant-Colonel of
Uhlans of the Landwehr who claimed to know something of you, rather
luckily for your ambitions!--where did you come across him?  '_An
English schoolboy,' he called you, 'crazy to see War!_'"

P. C. Breagh explained:

"He did know something of me, sir!--though it was the merest
chance--our meeting.  Until a week ago he was a teacher of English at
the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and lodged at my
landlady's.  And they recalled him to Berlin a few hours before the
Declaration of War."




XXXV

It was the Doctor's turn to whistle.

"Phew!  So that's how they spy out and trap deserters from their
Reserve and _Landwehr_.  Clever--uncommonly!  Possibly it's not
business to tell you, but you've given away a genuine bit of
information.  And as a lesson in caution for the future, I shall
annex your nugget--do you hear?  In return--I've a pass for an extra
groom who has shot the moon with three weeks' double pay in advance,
the cowardly beggar!  And--supposing you're not too proud--I'll take
you with me as far as Mayence."

"I don't know how to thank you, sir!"

"Leave thanking for the present."  He pulled out the gold
chronometer, secured by its twisted thong.  "Ten o'clock, and here
come Towers and Brotherton, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, '_with
a kind of confession in their looks which their modesties have not
craft enough to color_.'  No news to be had?  No starting for Mayence
before twelve sharp, in spite of honied entreaties lavished on the
authorities?"

"Deuce a scrap!"

"Devil a minute!"

They threw themselves upon chairs, hot, dusty and panting.  They had
got their papers back, countersigned, from a kind of understrapper,
after, to do him justice, very little delay.  But of intelligence,
not a modicum was obtainable, except that the Emperor was said to be
close to the frontier near Saarbrück at the head of the Imperial
Guards.

"Though they've been saying that for forty-eight hours," grumbled
Tower, "and I'm dam' if I call it anything but Ancient History."

At which candid confession the Doctor's mouth twitched under the
thick, curling mustache of rusty iron-gray.  He said, his quick eye
noting an excited stir and bustle about the thronged entrance of the
hotel, and the crowding of officers about another, who had a paper in
his hand:

"Those officers have heard--something that is not Ancient History.
And look at the fellows who were eating at the tables in the windows;
they've something tastier to discuss now than the landlord's
indifferent grub!"

It was true.  In the long dining-room, in the restaurant, and in the
reading-room, which had been converted into a temporary coffee-room,
men were swarming like bees and buzzing like them, while detached,
staccato sentences shaped out of the buzz.

"Saarbrück ... Spicheren ... Frossard ... Colonel von Pestel...."

"Something up...."  Towers adjusted his eyeglass.  Brotherton,
catching a sentence shouted by an officer of a _jäger_ battalion to
another green-coat leaning from a window on the second-floor, jumped
as though he had been prodded with a bayonet, and turned a flaming
face upon his friend:

"A telegram has come in...  There has been serious fighting at
Saarbrück.  Did they lie to us at the station, then?  Officers and
gentlemen----"

"Softly, Chris!"  The Doctor's hand upon his arm checked him on the
verge of a fiery outburst.  "I fancy they've a right to hold back
intelligence dispatched from Headquarters when the senders mark the
wire '_Delay_.'"

"No doubt, but I had better interview the Commandant.  Details would
be worth having!" said Brotherton, adding with a peculiar smile, "Or
at least I, in my inexperience, am inclined to think so."

Came the quick answer:

"You can have details now--without troubling the Commandant!
Full--well, as fully as I got them--under a strict undertaking of
secrecy for four hours--at six o'clock this morning!"

Brotherton turned as ashen-pale as he had hitherto been crimson.
Towers called out gleefully, as active little thrills of excitement
coursed down P. C. Breagh's spine:

"Bravo, Doctor!  And you had it up youi sleeve all the time.
'Unfold, thou man of 'orrid mystery!' as Miss Le Grange says at
Astley's in the _Specter's Bride_."

"There's not so much to unfold.  But from, eight thousand to ten
thousand French troops made an attack on Saarbrück yesterday.  Some
battalions of the 8th Prussian Army Corps had augmented the original
garrison, and their nearest support was at Lebach, five miles to the
rear.  A mitrailleuse-battery and some field-guns posted on the
Keppertsberg drove the Blue Uniforms out of the town!"

Towers said: "Then why the deuce..." and broke off.  Brotherton
gloomed heavily.  The Doctor went on:

"The Emperor and the Prince Imperial were on the heights, with the
Imperial Staff, to see the show--an astonishing spectacle it must
have been.  Frossard, in the center with supports drawn from the
Second Corps--Marshal Bazaine on the right, with troops picked from
the Third.  And in command of the Fifth Corps, De Failly, who crossed
the river at Saarguemines."

Queried Tower:

"And when the big bow-wow had made the little one drop the bone, he
didn't stick to it?"

The Doctor returned:

"No--and that's the puzzle of the whole affair.  The whole glorious
display resolved itself into a cannonade, with occupation of the
heights on the left bank, and nothing further.  Though the French
foreposts actually occupied the three bridges and held the town."

Tower said, his pale eyes sharp with intelligence:

"Bet you a tenner it was done for the boy.  Got up to blood the
young'un--cockerel of the Walk Imperial.  Geewhillikins!--What
telegrams Nap must have fired off to St. Cloud!"

"They'll have read them in Berlin and London long before they get to
us," said the Doctor, shrugging.  "Where are you off to, Brotherton?"

Brotherton returned--and the tone was offensive, if the words were
not:

"To do what my senior Special does not appear to think
necessary--wire the news to Printing House Square."

The elder answered with a good-humored twinkle:

"Why, that was done hours back, by grace of the authorities.  They
bridled my tongue, but left my pen unhampered.  Knowing, of course,
that the British Public must wait for its news until breakfast-time
to-morrow.  Were you speaking to me, Brotherton?"

The Major was saying in a voice as little like his own as the livid
mask of rage he turned on the Doctor resembled his ordinarily calm
and placid visage:

"I was addressing you, though it pleased you not to hear me.  I was
asking you what you meant, by G----! in stealing a march on the man
you've called your friend?"

The Doctor's eyes blazed behind their gold-rimmed glasses.  Anger
darkened his handsome sunburnt face.  He drew himself up and said,
speaking simply and with dignity:

"How do you infer that I have 'stolen a march on you'?  By taking the
apology they give one here for a cold tub at cockcrow and going over
to the Hauptmann's office with our papers while you and Tower were
sleeping like----"

"Like dormice, by Gad!" put in Tower.  "And so we were.  And it's a
case of the early bird--and not the first time, I'll swear--by
thousands!  And, Brotherton--you ought to apologize.  You were simply
infernally rude just now!"

Said the Major loftily:

"I gave it as my opinion that I had been dealt with unfairly.  I do
not withdraw the words I used.  But I comprehend that my senior in
the service of the paper is not anxious to share the credit of the
earliest intelligence with regard to what is taking place on the
frontier just now."

"For God's sake, Chris, don't say what you'll be sorry for!"

"I'll say what I think, to you, sir, or to the King of Prussia!"

The gray-bearded, strongly-featured face, with the look of generous
sorrow on it, and the younger, fairer, handsomer face, with the stamp
of arrogance and vanity and pride marring its manly beauty,
confronted each other in silence, until, with an impatient snarl,
Brotherton swung round upon his heel.

"Look here!--look here!--where the merry hell are you off to?" Tower
spluttered, grabbing at the sleeve of the splendid scarlet tunic.
"Not going to part company for a misunderstanding--hey?"

"I am going to part company," Brotherton returned bitterly, freeing
himself from the detaining hand, "since the jealousy that hampered me
in my military career threatens to mar my prospects now.  Where I am
going to I cannot tell you--probably you will hear from me, but I
cannot promise it.  Good-bye!  Or--if you prefer it--_Auf
wiedersehen_!"

He shook hands with Tower, nodded coldly to the astonished P. C.
Breagh, formally saluted the Doctor, who returned with a slight bow,
picked up his cap and cloak and strode away over the sun-dried grass
and the hot yellow gravel, making for the gaudily painted iron gates
that ended the drive.

"Oh, Chris, man-alive, and am I jealous of ye?" said the Doctor, his
spectacles dewy with irrepressible laughter, as the gallant figure in
its gorgeous scarlet and golden trappings was swallowed in a crowd of
blue uniforms: "If you'd waited another minute, I'd have told you of
something else your senior in the service of the paper by seventeen
years, some odd days, and a minute or two isn't anxious to share with
you, and that is a reputation for not being a hot-headed,
unreasonable young ass!"

"He's making a bee-line for the Railway Station," said Tower, wiping
his heated forehead with a gaudily-hued silk handkerchief, "and if he
comes across any of those Transport swells there'll be the deuce to
pay.  He's got the bit in his teeth and his tail tight down over the
ribbons, by George!--and he'll kick the trap to pieces and lame
himself to a dead certainty.  Shall I go after him and try to
_soother_ him down a bit?"

The Doctor shrugged assent.

"If you think 'twill be any good! ... Meanwhile I have to write a
letter or two, and pack, or rout my man out of the servants' quarters
to do it.  As for you, my boyo!"--he turned on P. C. Breagh a keen,
humorous glance that summoned up blushes to mantle under the railway
grime--"a wash and brush-up will do you no harm, and besides--my
absconding Berliner isn't described on his passport as a mulatto!"


Tower came back in half an hour, reporting failure in the attempt to
pacify Brotherton, who nevertheless joined the Doctor's little party
at the station, having apparently recovered his serenity of temper,
and abandoned his determination to forswear his senior's company.

Beer, coffee, bread and meat were still being lavishly distributed
among the troops continually parading for departure, and the
train-loads of soldiers passing through.  And the exodus of
panic-stricken visitors, flying from the little up-Rhine watering
places, in apprehension of the arrival of the Emperor with his
mitrailleuses, continued; until, in another hour, the shrunken finger
of the Warlock wagged, and thenceforth the Rhine Valley Railways were
totally blocked for civilian passengers, and given over to the
transport of men and munitions of war.

Presently, when a train of coal-trucks from Kreuznach came jolting
into Bingen, bearing on their sable flanks the chalk hieroglyphics
that signified their official emptiness, P. C. Breagh was destined to
behold personages of the loftiest rank and the utmost exclusiveness,
German Serene Highnesses, Austrian Duchesses, and English peeresses,
with their children and lap-dogs, their maids, _chefs_, coachmen,
lackeys, and grooms, packed into these grimy vehicles without
precedence or selection, or any seating-accommodation other than that
afforded by an empty sack or an armful of straw.

The troop-train conveying the mounted gendarmerie of the Third Army
Corps--huge men equipped as dragoons--to Mayence, afforded
accommodation to the men, horses and vans of the Doctor's party.
Long before the fortifications came in sight the roads were blotted
out by marching columns, and the fields were dotted with moving
transport-trains.

At Mayence, whose stone-paved streets were roaring with the passage
of iron-shod wheels, the trampling of iron-shod hoofs, and the
measured tramping of infantry battalions, the Doctor, stepping from
the train, was seized upon by friends.  Yet after the first eager
interchange of interrogations and answers, he found time to bestow a
parting hand-grip on Carolan and a final word of advice.

"And--put this in your pocket--it'll be a help to you if it doesn't
hang you.  They're lithographed by the Prussian War Department, and
every German officer has one.  And here's something else, a lot more
use than the revolver those chaps stole from you.  You'll know better
than to use it unless in case of need!"

This was a folding pocket-map of the Eastern Departments of France,
with certain military routes very nicely marked in red upon it.
While the something else proved to be a wicker-covered metal
pocket-flask, containing about half-a-pint of the whisky of Kinahan.

The donor added:

"Remember, train your memory to pigeon-hole things for later
description, and never be caught taking notes, or fighting on a side!
And--be on your guard with women, pretty ones especially.
And--there's a scrap of paper in the pocket of the map-cover, may
come in handy, at a pinch.  No, no thanks!  General von Reigen,
that's the light blue Würtemburg Hussar officer talking to
Tower--tells me Moltke and his staff are quartered at the Hotel de
Holland.  If so, the King won't be far off.  He thinks Bismarck has
gone to a house outside the town, but he can't swear to it.  There
goes a carriage with the Red Prince's big buck-nigger on the box.
Shows his Highness must be somewhere hereabouts.  As for the Crown
Prince, nobody will say anything.  He's marching--with an end in
view.  And they say the French are shooting uncommonly badly--and
that half of the Reserve men don't know how to use their chassepots.
Well, they'll have practice enough before long.  Good luck, and
good-bye!"

The "scrap of paper," upon later examination, proved to be a
five-pound note, placed there by the hand that later penned those
wonderful war-letters--under a wayside hedge, at a corner of a plank
bivouac-table, on the zinc counter of a wine-shop filled with
carousing soldiers--at the ebony and tortoiseshell _éscritoire_ of
Madame la Marquise, in the boudoir of the château that had been so
sorely battered by those big potatoes of Moltke's.

Kind little, great man; a whole chestful of Orders had no power to
chill the big warm heart that prompted your many deeds of generosity.
It molders in a coffin now, and the decorations are dimming with dust
in a glass-topped box.  But beyond the Veil that parts the seen from
the unseen world, I like to think that there were waiting for you
rewards and honors, in comparison with which the most coveted earthly
insignia were vilest dirt and dross.




XXXVI

Said the sutler-woman, whose coarse black hair was powdered white as
any lady's of the early eighteenth century, smearing the dust from
the peonies of her cheeks with a brawny arm that was dusty as any
miller's:

"Young man, if thou stick to thy word, and take good care of the
jackass, remembering the sharp nail-spike in the end of the whip-butt
if he tries to kick or bite--I'll creep in under the tilt and take a
forty-winks.  Lord be thanked! my legs are sound, but they ache a
bit!"

The jackass, who boasted the not inglorious name of "Rumschottel,"
laid back his ears viciously at his mistress's reference to the
persuasive spike in the whip-butt, and the young man addressed by his
temporary employer nodded in assent without opening his lips.  For
the dust in which the little tilt-cart moved was almost solid, being
kicked up by the Seventh Corps of the Second Army of Germany, in line
of march through the Haardt Wald by Kaiserslautern.

The sutler-woman's young man had marched with the Fifth Corps from
Mayence by Oppenheim and Alzey, and had picked up an American tourist
who knew of a short cut to Kaiserslautern, and had mislaid the Army
Corps in trying to find it.  Staffs, squadrons, batteries,
battalions, transport and baggage had vanished like smoke among these
vineyard-and-forest-clad hills, these pine-jacketed gorges, these
roads that ran between natural ramparts of granite, or passed through
quaint villages tucked under hillsides crimson and gold with laden
appletrees, and dominated by ancient castles perched on towering
platforms of rock.

Scenery palls when the thigh-bones seem wearing through their
sockets; when the stomach complains for very emptiness, and there are
bloody blisters inside the ragged socks.  The American who had been
so cocksure about the road to Kaiserslautern was lying up under a
peasant's penthouse-thatch, at a twenty-mile distant village,
drinking Kirsch, nursing his own skinless heels, and reading up
"Murray."  His late companion had refused to give in, and
perseverance had won its reward.  Sixty miles or so above Kreuznach,
where the main road forks right and left, climbing the shoulders of
the Nahe Valley, he had met the Ninth Corps of the Second Army
marching up from Bingen, and hobbled at the heels of one of the dusty
battalions until he could hobble no more.

The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside,
had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters,
supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout
socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by
her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as
far as Kaiserslautern.  True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you
cannot have everything.  And the weather was so beautifully dusty,
thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of
use.  Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in
liquid lubricants would be less roaring.  And the tilt-cart
contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel
of rather luke-warm beer.

The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the
hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was
issued from behind.  There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed.
A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel
look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper
row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite.
Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and
continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so
as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly
endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward
through a blazing August noon.

Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons
flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered
with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of
a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red
Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse
and man.  But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse
Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that
marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive
whitey-brown.

Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an
eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not
to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead.  For the
First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters
Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night
the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach,
south of Landau....  Five or six in the morning, supposing him to
have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier.  And
scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of
Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden
Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz.  For all they knew, "Unser
Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.

So they marched--as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen,
swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds
of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade,
water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard
brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.

Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell
out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the
most part falling to the lot of Reservists.  And in the hottest part
of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a
deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste.  Then the sun
came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck
her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her
young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.

So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a
sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed.
Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he
fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared.
And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced
black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a
mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her
vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her
servitor.  She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug
of coffee out of a private bottle of _schnaps_.

"_Herr Je!_" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?"  For her
young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching
legs....  She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and
sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke
up....  Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got
clockwork inside them....  It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it
will be so in France.  And what the Danes got the French will get,
and that will be a thumping!"  She nodded directly afterward and
dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.

Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched
by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step.  They had
hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought
P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp
of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly.
They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had
been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came
less frequently out of their dustier bags.  They marched for the most
part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid
ground reverberate.

Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down
before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning
corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard
as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant
tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge
chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a
scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had
held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer.
Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger
had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries
might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken
stirrup-iron.  Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots,
as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded
and would follow them--green things were beaten from the face of
earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third
Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before
Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.

Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows,
and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them,
like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked.
Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and
hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of
their camp to be marching even as they slept.  The lusty snoring of
the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of
stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the
rushing of a host in onward motion.  When the boy who had lain
through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from
light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his
blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still.  Then
in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill
bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé--and when the tremendous
war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught
up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a
chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a
wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its
dreadful way.

He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a
blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past,
sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column.
"Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the
right-hand, and: "Nobody's--joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the
reply.  Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of
biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened,
neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,--no more an
ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.


Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of
eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner
became addicted to the use of beer with _schnaps_ as a lacing.  She
had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there
was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big,
battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied
crosswise over her voluminous bust.  She yawned, struggled to the
perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her
corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman,
yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:

"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists!
Such a _gimpel_ I never yet did see!  But they say all the _Englisch_
are mad, their climate makes them so.  Otherwise would they not live
in their country?--but no! they can't.  _Hier_!  Catch Rumschottel,
and let's be moving!"

P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the
contumely heaped on the United Kingdom.  It was better to be on the
black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her
too-favorable regard.

For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly
played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she
was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not
only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards,
dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following,
between marches, the oldest profession in the world.

Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of
the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C.
Breagh had flatly declined.  Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by
jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part.
Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of
her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among
her clients of the rank and file.

"You threadling, you whipper-snapper!  You pickled herring in a
jacket and breeches!  There is a man buried in the Domkirche at
Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and
has more of good red life in him to-day than thou!  '_Frauenlob_,'
they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women!
and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier.
And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your
knees in it--all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes
cream!"

The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the
situation.  But the wound remained; and as the better-half of
Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the
sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass,
through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long
blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless,
dusty men marched by.

There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed
after them.  Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage,
ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other
battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and
the skin wore off his heels.

At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his
straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.

He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly.
P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments,
marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a
moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform--it was
marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method
of relief....  His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare
chest, his _pickelhaube_ was perched upon the cooking-pan crowning
his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over
his steaming head.

Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale,
staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open
mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down
the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown.  But
suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden
giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun.  Men were
thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and
tin-ware.  Yet they marched on without a pause.

Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the
way.  Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh,
yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran
in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.

"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman
cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and
was ravenously devouring weeds.  She added, becoming aware of the
prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun
unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white
already.  Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks'
time and trouble.  Better leave him for the _Feld-lazarett_ to pick
up."

But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate
Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel
seized her beast's head and trudged on.  If she had looked back, she
would have seen good Irish whisky wasted.  For despite the shade of
the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under
his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was
all up with the man, as she had prophesied.

He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried
to lift a hand to his perspiring chest.  By the tin crucifix
dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that
he tried to make the sacred Sign.  Then his eyes rolled up, and an
expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance.
His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking,
came from his open mouth.

"_A-a-ach!_"




XXXVII

He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man
was dead.  Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a
splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek,
and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and
stopped.  He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up
into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast
and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the
ground.  The officer asked in staccato sentences:

"It is a case of heat-stroke?  You are a doctor?"

P. C. Breagh answered shortly:

"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."

The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently.
The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:

"Very good.  Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"

P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's
name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it
face-upward on the discolored breast.  The captain, leaning from the
saddle, read, and mentally registered.  His keen eyes, hedged with
dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and,
somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile
in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on
the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense.  He scowled, and
the officer, noting this, asked curiously:

"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"

He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture.  Resenting the
gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with
a head-shake.  The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened
reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the
horse's within the palms....

"I asked, because you seemed--how shall one put it?--sorry for him,
you know!"

The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily.
The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:

"I am, damned sorry for him!  To come by his end like this--without
firing a single shot!"

There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on
between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy
pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside.  As the
broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their
way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces.
Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing
there.  And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful
bitterness:

"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!--as any fellow in his
battalion.  He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland!  I
daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for
some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife--he wears
a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!--with it when he got home.
And now it's all over.  It makes me feel sick.  All over, and nothing
to show for it!"

The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the
coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of
agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing
but this!"  The officer returned:

"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon
Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all.  And
presently the _Feld-lazarett_ will come up and put him in a wagon.
He will be buried at sundown, when we halt....  They will give him a
firing party and a bugler--everything will be done decently.  After a
battle there is not always--you understand?..."

He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue
tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience.
Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:

"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"

"'Pawns!'  My worthy sir, _our_ pawns are battalions!"  The captain
laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick
brown mustache.  "This was--a unit among myriads of myriads....  You
will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I
guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice....  Let me
advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance--the arm-badge is a
protection--of a definite kind."

He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted
relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of
dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of
myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.

A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a
moment previously.  Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed,
good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and
great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars
at will.  And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of
myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus
clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity
and a fury of disgust.

This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event,
shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest
enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal
tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,--involving the
humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.

Meanwhile--here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an
ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of
garden-herb, smelling evilly.

"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring
thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough."
Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off
the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden
border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry
after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his
faithful wife Lottchen.  One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen
and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name
and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had
been near him when he died.

For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond
pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the
already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast.  Then P. C.
Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and--a tin
crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace--touched
the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the
departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket
and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.

"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy
marching.  Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns
of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though
the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.

The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold
beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green,
with a vivid, springlike hue.  The clear, thin dusk of August fell,
yet the tireless columns marched on--and in company of other, even
queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly
continued to trudge beside them.  When at length the halt was
sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and
threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had
long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.

Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a
bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of
the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the
scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the
forerider showing above.  As luck would have it, orders had been
given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this
flax-field.  And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and
the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C.
Breagh.

Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into
which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him.  The
heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the
loins while yet in mid-air.  Adding insult to injury, the
artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the
battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were
grinning from ear to ear.  Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a
cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....

Upon the farther side two half-battalions of infantry, divided by a
little bushy knoll, were already encamped upon a strip of gorsey
grass.  The thing had been done as if by magic, the officers grouped
in the foreground round their little camp tables were drinking Rhine
wine and beer as peacefully as though they had not stirred for hours.
Behind them the battalion-color and the halberd of the drum-major had
been planted upright in the center of an orderly array of drums and
band-instruments, the straight rows of knapsacks within rolled
greatcoats, stretching away in the rear, were divided by the
customary ten-pace interval, and the mathematically balanced stacks
of needle-guns.

Fires of brush and dry cones from the pine-groves fringing the road
crackled in the small oblong trenches dug by the fatigue-men.
Squad-cooks were cutting up pea-sausages, raw potatoes, and onions
into camp-kettles of water, destined to simmer, slung on sticks
reaching from bank to bank.  And the regimental butchers had already
slaughtered a couple of young bullocks, whose skins lay smoking by
the chopping-block.  Presently, when the officers' mess-cooks had
chosen such joints as seemed good to them, the rest of the meat would
go to enrich the stew of the rank-and-file.  Meanwhile the men,
scattered to the utmost limits of the cordon of sentries, blunted the
edge of hunger with black bread and the flinty brown biscuit, crowded
thirstily round the beer and wine-carts, squatted in groups playing
cards, chatting, or singing part-songs; wrestled and ran races, or
dozed lying face downward on the sunburnt grass, their foreheads
resting on their folded arms.

A charming scene, now that the all-pervading dust had begun to
settle--the bivouac roofed in by the clear green twilight, through
which diamond star-points began to thrust.  If only one had been less
sharp-set, and the proprietors of the wine and beer-carts had had
bread and sausage to sell as well as warm, flat beer and
musty-smelling vintage, the beauty would have appealed to one a good
deal more.

Squatted by a lichened boulder in a clump of sun-scorched bracken, P.
C. Breagh searched his pockets, and then the recesses of his
knapsack, for something to eat.  An ancient crust of black bread
rewarded his investigations, just as the savory-smelling camp-kettles
were taken off the fires.

He fell to work upon his crust as the stew was apportioned, and the
big cans of beer distributed to each mess; and as he gnawed dog-like
at the stone-hard lump of baked rye-dough, he caught the eye of one
of the Barmecides, a merry-faced, red-haired young private, who was
evidently the jester of his squad.

"Our soup smells good, what?  Well, the smell may be had for nothing.
He may fill his belly with as much of that as he can!"

A roar of laughter greeted the sally of the humorist.  To whom P. C.
Breagh nodded assent, and, gravely extending his diminished crust in
the quarter from whence the whiff of oniony pea-soup came most
powerfully, fell to with apparently renewed appetite, provoking the
approving comment:

"He can take a joke!  Well, then, let him take this!  and this!
Catch it, _junge_!"

A lump of very fresh beef, boiled in the oniony pea-soup, was dumped
into a bit of newspaper, screwed up, and pitched across to the
supperless.  P. C. Breagh gratefully caught the oleaginous parcel and
the two hard Army biscuits that came after, and, pulling out some
small change, signified his desire to pitch back the coins in return.
But a big hand waved them vigorously away, with the gruff
exclamation: "_Der Teufel!_ let him keep his pfennigs.  One gives a
share of one's supper--one doesn't sell!"

And so genuine was the one that, despite the smarting weal that had
been the gift of another less kindly, P. C. Breagh's faith in
humanity lifted up its head.

He disposed of the grub, and drank some hill-water tinctured with
Kinahan, a permissible indulgence in view of his fatigue, and stuffed
the well-used briar-root with bird's eye, and, propping his back
comfortably against the boulder, kindled the pipe of peace.  By
nature clubbable, and athirst for news, he would have liked to mingle
with the replete, unbuttoned soldiers, who, supper over, gathered
round the fires to smoke and chat and sing.  But the snub dealt by
Valverden had not left off smarting; the fear of incurring another
rebuff, even from a social inferior, kept him aloof and solitary.  He
realized with dismay that his stock of self-confidence was beginning
to run low.

"I'd a lot of faith in myself when I accepted that commission from
Knewbit," he ruminated, chewing hard on the stem of the venerable
briar-root.  "More than half his money's spent--what did I want with
that revolver?--and I haven't written him a line.  Instead, I've
swotted up a thundering long descriptive article, telling people all
about what they know already--and sent it to that shaved sea-elephant
in a Gladstone collar, who told me I might forward letters from the
seat of hostilities if ever I got there!"

He frowned, mentally reviewing the points of the first-born launched
upon the tide of speculation.  However ancient its matter might be,
the vigor and mastery of that descriptive article--completed in the
train between Bingen and Mayence, and dropped with paternal
solicitude into the sack of a corporal of the Field Post--would
surely--could not fail to--insure its appearance in print.

Why did a horrible conviction of its utter stodginess come home to
him at this eleventh hour?  Its labored periods revolted, its stately
mawkishness sickened his memory.  He knocked out the pipe-bowl
against the boulder and got out his note-book and began to jot down a
letter to Mr. Knewbit by the light of the now risen moon, who, with
Venus blazing emerald at her opulent side, hung high in the
south-east, looking down upon forest and field, mountain, valley and
river, and the armed men and beasts, guns and wagon-trains, strung
out over leagues of distance, calmly as befitting an aged Queen
familiar with the portents of War.

She stared down so haughtily at the travel-soiled and dusty scallawag
lying upon the fringe of the bivouac among the remnants of a meal
cadged from a soldier's camp-kettle, that he caught her eye and broke
his pencil-lead.  No! he couldn't write, even well enough to "please
plain, homely people." ... Why, hang it all!--Old Knewbit must have
known from the beginning, to do that was the highest and most
difficult art of all.  Men came into the world equipped, as had come
Shakespeare, and Scott, and Dickens, each with a single feather, such
as might belong to the wing of a Phcenix or an Archangel, sprouting
from his own flesh.  Urged by the inborn crave to set down Life, each
had plucked forth his birth-gift with a pang of unutterable anguish,
and there, at the quill-end, hung a single drop of red, red blood.
And that drop tinctured every page they penned, and thus what they
wrote lived.  To be a distinguished War Correspondent one had to be
born with the magic pen-feather.  The Doctor had it.  That was why
his written sentences dug home to the quick.  Without it, Success
would never come to one, no matter how hard one tried for it.  One
would be nothing better all one's life than a plodding paragraphist.


Pity an unlucky youth, fagged, footsore, and smarting, not only from
disillusion and chagrin, but from the very recent application of an
Artillery horsewhip.  In addition, the infantry band had now begun to
play with soul-melting sweetness.  First "The Lorelei," and then "Red
Dawn That Lights Me to My Early Grave," and then the song of Siebel
from "Faust"--with all its yearning passion and tender anguish.  And
possibly other eyes were wet besides P. C. Breagh's, who fairly put
down his head and sobbed, under cover of the twilight and the
protecting boulder, as he had not done since his knickerbocker
days....  Not now from a vague, wistful aching for the voice and the
touch of the young, unknown, long-dead mother.  Pain and longing were
there, but of how different a kind....

The reign of Brünhilde-Britomart-Isolde was over.  That night saw the
smallest and slenderest of heroines established on the vacant throne
of the Ideal.

He who wept was not the type of a young girl's hero, choking and
gulping, and burrowing his hot, wet face into the dry, rustling fern.
But he suffered as only youth can suffer, the pangs were very real
that wrung from him such stifled cries as these:

"Oh, God!  I love her--Juliette de Bayard! ... I have loved her since
the moment our eyes met.  My infernal ingratitude that she forgave
like an angel!--the brutal things I thought and said of her--were
because I could not forgive myself for loving her so.  My discontent,
my restlessness, my ambition to do something and be somebody--weren't
they prompted by the longing to cut a figure in her eyes! ... Lovely
eyes;--and at this minute her husband may be kissing them!--'the
noble gentleman, brave as a lion,' who fought like the deuce and all!
Stop, though!  If he's an Army man, he has had to leave her.  Could I
have borne to do that if I had had the luck to be in his shoes?  Yet
how she would despise a lover who hesitated between her and his duty!
Even if '_her heart-strings about his heels were tied_,' as the
Suabian ballad says, '_she would bid him march to war!_'  For a girl
like that could love, mind you! like Juliet and Desdemona and Viola
rolled into one, and yet never be blinded by love into forgetfulness
of God, or honor, or loyalty.  It is written in her face.  Are these
things first with me?  I'm afraid not!... I think not!... I know
they're not!... And yet I dare to love her--to whom they mean
everything!"

His conscience stung and smarted like the weal from the Artillery
whip-lash.  And the dread of Death and the Hereafter wakened in him,
shuddering and quaking in the creeping dusk.

Now he comprehended his own insignificance and weakness and
loneliness....  He had seen a man die that day, suddenly, without
time for preparation, as thousands of others would die before the
ending of this war.  What if to-morrow at the hottest hour the
trenchant blade of the sun should bite through P. C. Breagh's
brain-pan?  He heard the other self within him saying "Suppose...?"
And he asked himself, with a cold sweat breaking out upon his flesh,
and a curious stirring among the roots of his hair, what would have
happened only an hour or two back, if the flying squirrel-leap that
had made the white teeth flash against the brown faces of the gunners
on the limber, had failed to land the dusty scallawag who had been
sleeping in the flax-field beyond reach of the pounding of the hoofs
of the battery-team! ...

"_Father, I cry to Thee!_"

The soldiers were singing the Battle Prayer of Körner, the lusty
Teutonic basses and baritones and tenors mingling in melodious unison
with the night-breeze that had risen with the moon.

Previously P. C. Breagh might have smiled at the simultaneous
production of hymn-books, the rising at the word of command to
sing--the short, business-like prayer recited by an officer, that was
followed by a crashing Amen.

Now, it seemed to him, there was something wholesome and good in the
military regulation that united men of every Christian creed and
denomination, with those who habitually omitted religion from the
daily routine, in the brief act of worship described....  Recalled by
it to the teachings of the Mother Church, he made the sacred sign
upon brow and breast, and whispered his nightly prayers.  The name of
Juliette mingled in the entreaty that Our Lord and His Mother would
bless and guard those dear to the petitioner from danger and harm.

"And not let me come to grief for _her_ sake--of course I mean
Monica's!  For she never would have loved me even if there hadn't
been another man.  But O! take care of her, and shield her from evil,
sickness, grief, and danger.  And let me see her again one day!"

He grew drowsy, lying against the yet sun-warm boulder, listening to
the distant cry of the mousing owl, and the long rattling _chur'r'r!_
of the nightjar, mingled with the occasional snorting of the tethered
horses, the measured tramp of the sentries,--the small explosions
made by pine-cones thrown upon the blazing guard-fires, and the other
sounds of the bivouac.




XXXVIII

The watch was set at nine o'clock.  Then the "Lie Down" sounded far
and near, and the moon stared down on rows of prone men wrapped in
their greatcoats and pillowed on their knapsacks, stretching away
under the pansy-dark canopy of heaven for miles.

The officers sat for some time longer, drinking their Rhine wine and
playing cards by moonshine and lantern-light, or strolling, cigar in
mouth, upon the outskirts of the bivouac.  Several
Artillery-officers, who had supped with them, went back to their own
bivouac after voluble leave-takings.  Infantry-officers, who had
shared the hospitality of the gunners, returned, enlivening the night
with, scraps of gossip, and more or less melodious song.

A couple of these late-comers halted on the outskirts of the cordon
of sentries to finish a confidential conversation.  The moon was
obscured by clouds, the bivouac was swathed in shadow.  Of the lumpy
boulder by which the Adjutant stood, only its shape could be
discerned against the dusty-pale grass by the dust-white road.

Said the Adjutant to the senior Captain, and the excellent cigar he
was smoking smelt pleasantly in the dark:

"One can't call yesterday's a big battle, but at the same time it was
a tolerably serious engagement."

The senior Captain snorted.

"_Donnerwetter!_ one would think so.  Nearly fifteen hundred
prisoners, and Douay's Division obliged to abandon its camp and
baggage.  The Crown Prince has begun well--one expected no less!"

Said the Adjutant:

"I shall advise the Herr Colonel to announce the news to the regiment
at roll-call to-morrow.  It will make a good moral impression upon
those who are new to Active Service, when they realize that the
French have been trounced."

Then they were silent a moment, but one felt that both were crowing.

We know what had happened.  Before midday the Crown Prince had
pounded Douay's Division into brickbats, the brave General himself
was dead, the town of Wissembourg had fallen; by two o'clock the
mitrailleuse-batteries on the Geisburg had been silenced, and the
Chateau stormed and won.

The men of the Imperial Army in Alsace had fought magnificently.
Red-capped, swarthy Turcos in baggy white breeches, Zouaves and
French infantrymen, light blue Bavarian and dark blue Prussian
uniforms, with what had been brave men inside them, lay scattered
among the hop-gardens and vineyards on the mountain-side.

Of these no doubt the Adjutant was thinking when he threw away his
cigar-butt and said, with a sigh and an oath together:

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ one does not win victories for nothing.  It
must have been a bloody fight, and especially in the streets; you
understand me?  The French fired from the windows, and from the roofs
of the houses....  There was a terrible struggle at the point of the
bayonet, and both sides used the butt--liberally!"

"The butt may be brutal," commented the senior Captain, clearing his
throat and expectorating copiously; "but all the same it is a
hellishly useful thing!"

"Why leave your enemy brains when he may live to plan your defeat by
the use of them?" agreed the Adjutant.  The scabbard of his sword
clinked, as he moved, against the boulder, and the sound made an
eavesdropper go goose-fleshy all over, as he lay prone among dry
bents and bracken in the blackness on the farther side.  Then he
heard the Captain ask:

"Did the Crown Prince continue the advance to-day?" and strained his
ears for the Staff officer's reply.

"Undoubtedly!  Moltke's telegram from the King's Headquarters at
Mainz ran: '_Seek out and fight the enemy wherever you may find
him,_' and Marshal MacMahon is said to be concentrating all his force
on a high plateau between Froeschwiller and Eberbach, west of the
Sauer and the Sulz.  The bridges have been broken--his position is an
exceptionally strong one....  Of course you know the kind of ground!"

"Open ground," snorted the Captain, "over which an assailant must
pass to get at him.  _Sapperlot!_ don't I wish I'd had the chance
to-day!"

"You are too greedy, Scheren," joked the Adjutant.  "Ts't!  What was
that?"

Both men were silent, intently listening.  For the eavesdropper,
titillated to madness by a spear of seed-grass that had thrust up a
nostril, had given a smothered sneeze.  Now on the point of
discovery, he found presence of mind sufficient to repeat the sneeze,
panting doggishly, whining and scratching among the fern....

The ruse was successful.  The Adjutant said, laughingly:

"It's a dog, nosing at a rat or rabbit-hole.  Under-Lieutenant
Brand's terrier 'Nagler,' perhaps."

"Hie, then, boy!"

"Here, Nagler!"

The Captain whistled, the other man advised indifferently:

"Let the brute alone--perhaps the rabbit's a French one!"  He added,
"It would be amusing to read a dog's Impressions of the campaign.
What time is it?  'Ten!'  Very well, I shall go and turn in.  You'll
do the same thing if you'll take my advice."

The Captain grunted assent, and the two officers clanked away
together, while P. C. Breagh noiselessly collected his venerable
waterproof, his water-bottle, and knapsack, and departed in search of
a more distant sleeping-place.

But when he found it in a dry ditch a quarter-of-a-mile below the
Mounted Artillery bivouac, and stretched himself out to sleep, he
could not....  His head rang with the news that would presently
thrill the civilized world.

First blood to Germany....  Did the Doctor know? ...

That genial little gentleman had prophesied accurately.  The "meaty
bone" of early and accurate information had fallen to the "tyke at
the tail of the Army Corps."  While the prophet, delayed by
pumped-out horses and recalcitrant grooms, at the Lion Inn of
Neustadt, knew no more than that the heir to the Prussian Crown was
over the frontier, and was reported to have taken Wissembourg from
the French.


That dry ditch accommodated a complacent lodger.  His misgivings
banished by one stroke of fortune, P. C. Breagh brooded sleeplessly
over the Koh-i-noor that had fallen to him....  Though, to hold such
a jewel and know oneself impotent to use it, that was the verjuice
mingled in the cup of bliss.

Without funds for telegraphing--an Editor to print one's letters--and
a public ready to read, what was the use of information?  Stop!  What
was that the more authoritative of the two officers had said?--the
one who had given the news to the other man?  "_It would be amusing
to read a dog's impressions of the campaign! ..._"

Would it?  Such a dog, perhaps, as the mongrel that had joined the
green-jacketed Saxon infantry regiment at Bingen.  The cur the
compassionate soldier had christened "Bang."  Lying on his back,
pillowed on his knapsack, staring at the waning moon, the boy
pondered.  Suppose one wrote one's letters to Knewbit in the assumed
character of Bang?

The idea grew, and he sat up to review its possibilities.  Something
soft and feathery brushed past his ear as he stirred.  An owlet, most
likely, yet I prefer to believe that it may have been the wing of
Inspiration, touching the head destined to be crowned by Fame.


"Pages from the Diary of 'Bang,' the Battalion Dog."  That should be
the title, or simply, "The Story of 'Bang.'"  "Short and to the
point," he heard Mr. Knewbit saying.  And Knewbit ...

Here was day! ...

Reveille after reveille sounded, shattering his train of thought,
waking the hilly echoes.  Under how strange a sky the bugles
clamored, the bivouac stopped snoring; men sat up on dew-wet cloaks
and rubbed their eyes.

The cup of heaven was red as though brimmed with blood new-drained
from the veins of heroes.  In the leftward hemisphere looking East,
Ursa Major swam in blood, blazing with white-hot fierceness.  On the
ensanguined South the Dog cowered as though in terror.  And like a
skeleton arm, the Milky Way pointed over the blood-dabbled
hill-crests and the blood-tipped pine-groves from the south-east,
West....

Men's faces and hands were crimsoned by reflections cast from that
portentous sunrise, the dew-wet grasses were dyed the same hue.

They broke their fast on their black bread washed down with bitter
black coffee.  In the pause that followed the roll-call, a voice
spoke.  And amid deafening cheers the news sprang from bearded lip to
lip.

"Lucky is the standard that flies over the first-fought field!" says
the proverb.

How those Teutons marched, that day of rain-pelts and thunderstorms,
upheld by their first draft of the strong wine of Success!


At Mayence, Moltke had commented to his Sovereign, with his keen old
eyes twinkling with joy:

"Douay's troops were preparing their evening coffee when the Prince
with his four Divisions appeared on the heights above Schweigen.  The
Red Breeches thought it was a _promenade militaire_ in the Second
Empire style, until the shells began to plop into their cooking-pots!"

"Thanks be to Heaven!" returned King William piously, "our
artillery-fire has improved since the Bohemian campaign."

"All the same," returned the Warlock, shaking the wise old head cased
in the auburn scratch-wig, "their musketry should do much for the
French.  For the chassepot is quicker in loading than our needle-gun,
and spits less, which is better for the aim....  Then our needle-gun
has A poor trajectory at 500 yards, and wounds rather than kills
outright.  While the chassepot bullet,--driven by its huge charge of
powder--has a splendidly flat trajectory, And flattening out,--makes
a magnificent wound!  In at the chest--out at the shoulder-blades!
... The man has a hole in him you can see the landscape through!"

And he nibbed his withered hands, the old specialist in slaughter.
While Bismarck said, laughing, to his cousin and military _attaché_:

"The enthusiast forgets that the perforated examples will be
German....  Look at him!  Already he begins to resemble a bird of
prey.  Have you read these French newspapers?  The King has laughed
heartily over them, but they must horribly irritate the Emperor.
Listen to this, from the _Constitutionnel: 'Prussia continues to
insult us with impunity, when the Armies of the Empire, at a word
from their Chief, might descend like three crashing avalanches upon
the hosts of Germany.  Why is the word not uttered?  Why is the
massacre--with the rout that must inevitably follow, delayed for a
single hour?_'" ...

The Emperor had perused the leaders, in his headquarters at the
Prefecture at Metz.  His eyes seemed opaque as clouded glass, his
face was a puffy mask, devoid of expression, as he replied to the
hinted condolences of a sycophant upon his staff.

"The opinions of these gentlemen of the Press were not solicited.
They are free to criticize me, let them do so.  I am not bound to
divulge to them my plans."

Alas! vacillation, hesitation, and delay on the part of the Imperial
Commander-in-Chief fatally clogged the movements of his magnificent
Army.  He did not put in an appearance with his staff at headquarters
until a fortnight subsequent to the Declaration of War.  A week
later--and no Plan of Campaign had been issued to his generals.
True, he had demolished, with field-fire, a beer-shop at Saarbrück.
He had paraded on the hills with Frossard's Army Corps.  He had
witnessed the evacuation of the town by its tiny garrison--had
withdrawn his advanced posts and gone home to Metz to dine and
telegraph to Paris of the "capture of the heights" and the "short
resistance of the Prussians";--to tell of the cannon-balls and
bullets which fell at his own feet, and those of the Prince Imperial,
"who showed admirable coolness."  "Some of the soldiers wept," he
adds, "beholding him so calm...."

And indeed, though one takes the soldiers' tears with a grain of
salt, the spirited bearing of the boy must have cheered the sick
heart of his father, and yet thrust another dagger in it, too.

Had the Imperial Commander-in-Chief any plan, one wonders....  Long
after he had ceased to be Emperor, a pamphlet was published at
Brussels, which is generally accepted as the work of the pen that
signed the Capitulation of Sedan.

"_To Marshals MacMahon and Lebœuf alone, the Emperor had entrusted
his scheme of warfare.  His purpose was--to mass 150,000 troops at
Metz, 100,000 at Strasbourg, and 50,000 at the Camp of Châlons.  The
concentration of the first two armies--one on the Sarre, and the
other on the Rhine--did not reveal the purpose of the Imperial
Commander-in-Chief, for the enemy would be left in uncertainty as to
whether the attack would be made against the Rhenish Provinces or the
Duchy of Baden._"

Would the Warlock have long remained in uncertainty?  But hear the
pamphleteer:

"_As soon as the troops should have been concentrated at the points
indicated, it was the Emperor's purpose to instantly unite the armies
of Metz and Strasbourg; and at the head of 250,000 men, to cross the
Rhine at Maxau, compel the Southern States of Germany to observe
neutrality, and hasten to encounter the Army of Prussia._"  Later on
occurs the pathetic complaint: "_If one could only know beforehand
exactly where the enemy was, one's plans would be easy to carry out!_"

Indeed, the dispositions of Moltke were made with baffling secrecy.
Even as the Heathen Chinee accommodated card-packs innumerable in his
ample sleeves, so the Warlock hid the twelve Army Corps of the North
German Confederation, with the Prussian Guard Corps, the Bavarian
Field Army and the Württemberg and Baden Divisions, in the skirts of
his military cloak....  When the moment came, the aged conjuror
twitched open the garment and showed them: Steinmetz with the First
Army at Treves, Prince Frederick Charles with the Second at Mayence,
the Crown Prince with the Third at Landau.

When the Three Armies rolled on, the art of the strategist covered
their movements with a baffling veil of cavalry.  That immense,
well-organized and highly mobilized arm was thrown well forward
before the Germans crossed the frontier: at their first entry into
France they came in contact with French troops.  A day's march ahead
of the Army Corps' advanced-guards, Divisions of Uhlans, Dragoons and
Hussars--(in a little all were "Uhlans" to the terrified French
peasants)--provided for the security of the huge infantry bivouacs
behind them; made requisitions for provisions, fuel, and forage;
rendered railways and telegraphs useless--scouted for the enemy's
positions--took prisoner or shot dispatch-bearers and
patrol-riders--harassed marches, and boldly fired into camps.  Many
fell in forays, or skirmishes, many were those accounted for by the
long-range hitting chassepot, which was heartily detested by
Prussia's mounted men.

"If I had not been called to Metz to attend an Imperial War-Council,"
Marshal MacMahon is reported to have said bitterly, when the news of
the defeat of Wissembourg reached him, "this blow upon the south
would not have fallen.  My Second Division would still be left to
guard the opening between the Vosges and the Rhine."

The thunder of the guns of Worth add their comment upon that
utterance.

Over the head of the town, lying at the bottom of a fertile valley
patched with hop-gardens and vineyards, and threaded by a river, was
waged between the Marshal with 50,000 troops, the pick and flower of
the French Army, and "Unser Fritz" with twice the number of men, a
desperate and bloody fight.

The French on the bluffy wooded cliffs that are the foothills of the
Vosges, occupied, as strategists have declared, an almost
unassailable position.  But the fire of the mitrailleuses was
hampered by the artillery of the 2d Bavarians under Hartmann, that
seasoned veteran, who had fought at Waterloo in 1815 and now led an
Army Corps against France in his seventy-sixth year.  Thus the
Prussian infantry crossed the Sauerbach on bridges improvised of
planks and hop poles; and though the chassepot proved an infinitely
deadlier weapon than the needle-gun, the generalship of Von Kirchbach
and Von der Tann,--in command of the Prussian 4th Division and 5th
Corps, backed by a division of the 11th Corps,--forced MacMahon's
hand.

Outnumbered, outflanked and disorganized, with the loss of 9,000 men
killed, 5,000 taken prisoners, twenty pieces of artillery, six
mitrailleuses, and two eagles, the Marshal fled by the way of Zabern,
under cover of night, trailing after him the beaten remnant of the
Army of Strasbourg.

The Third Army of Germany had lost 489 officers and 10,153 rank and
file.  Before night of the 7th the dead were buried in great
trenches, the columns of the Society of the Red Cross, the Sisters of
Mercy and Lutheran Deaconesses, with surgeons, volunteers, and Army
ambulance-bearers, had cleared the wounded from the field.

"Ah! if we had only had this sort of thing at the Alma and at
Inkerman!" a grizzled Zouave sapper growled to one of the ladies of
the Red Cross.  "I was wounded there--sacred name of a pipe!  My
belt-buckle was carried by a shell-splinter through my ceinture into
my stomach.  This very buckle, look you, that I wear to-day!"  He
added, rubbing the locality of the previous casualty: "There is
nothing inside there now, because of late they have not fed us, or
our chassepots.  How the devil can men kill Prussians without soup in
their bellies or cartridges in their guns?"

The Zouave spoke truth.  It was a half-equipped and under-rationed
army that had made such a splendid show at Froeschwiller.  It was a
starving, demoralized remnant that surged and weltered through the
passes of the Vosges at MacMahon's flying heels.  Cavalry on foot,
Zouaves riding Artillery-horses, mitrailleuse corps without
mitrailleuses, baggage-wagons crowded with men of a dozen different
regiments, went clanking and jolting over the roads that were
littered with discarded chassepots, bearing witness to the pitiable,
ghastly disorder of the retreat.

The hour of their defeat had seen Frossard's Army Corps holding with
Forton's Cavalry Brigade the heights over Saarbrück, simultaneously
attacked by the 7th and 8th Corps of Unser Fritz's terrible army, and
driven back in confusion and with slaughter, toward Metz.




XXXIX

The huge peacock-bubble of the Third Empire was pricked and leaking
in good earnest.  Thenceforward it was to shrink, and pale, and
dwindle to its inglorious end.

The Emperor must have known its days were numbered, when those wires
of the 6th reached him.  On the 7th the news of Wörth electrified
Paris.  Can you hear Jules Ferry joyfully exclaiming to the father of
Paul Déroulède, "The armies of the Third Napoleon are annihilated!
At last there dawns a day of hope for France!"  But fierce,
triumphant voices like these were drowned in the muffled sobs of
mothers, the moans of wives made widows, and the wailing of children
now fatherless.  Later, and as though to enhance the bitterness of
defeat, lying telegrams were published in Paris, announcing that the
Duke of Magenta had retaken Wissembourg, captured sixty guns, and
made 25,000 prisoners.  Chief among these unlucky ones figured the
Prussian Crown Prince, who in an access of despair had shot
himself....

For some hours the streets and boulevards were packed with rejoicing
multitudes.  Cries of "_Vive l'Empereur_," scarce at this era as
snowflakes in summer, were suddenly heard again.  Flags and Chinese
lanterns were displayed from every window, the people stopped the
hansom-cab in which the famous Opera tenor Capoul was being driven
along the Place de la Bourse, and, hoisting their idol to the top of
a stationary omnibus, compelled him to chant the "_Marseillaise_."

When the Emperor's sorrowful dispatches of the 7th revealed the cruel
truth, and proclamations signed by the Empress and the Ministers made
it public, rapture gave place to frenzy of the wildest.  Troops of
cuirassiers and mounted Gardes de Paris,--bands of National
Guards,--companies of the Line, and Marines were employed to clear
the Rue de la Paix, and the Places de l'Opéra and Vendôme, of rioters.

The Chambers assembled amid tumult indescribable.  Ministers were
insulted on their way to attend the deliberations.  "_À la
Frontière!_" cried the huge crowd, thronging the quay before the
Palace of the Corps Législatif.  "_Vive Rochefort!_"  "_À bas les
Ministres!_"  "_Chassepôts!_"

Their reiterated demands for arms could be heard within the Chamber.
Where, when M. Schneider mounted the tribune to read the Imperial
Decree of Convocation, the opening formula: "Napoleon, by the Grace
of God and the national will, Emperor of the French," was vigorously
howled down.  Ollivier, the unpopular Head of the Imperial Cabinet,
who had egged on the war, fared no better.  Later, the fall of his
Ministry was greeted with salvo upon salvo of enthusiastic applause,
and when the news was published all Paris went mad once more with joy.

While the moment of supreme collapse of the great peacock bubble was
coming nearer, the Crown Prince of Prussia was hunting MacMahon
through the defiles of the Vosges, his flying cavalry snapping up
scores of wounded or footsore stragglers, his advance batteries of
light artillery harassing the bleeding flanks of the fugitive.  The
Second and First Armies were moving Metzward, the Warlock having
knowledge that the Emperor's main Army, the Imperial Guard, and
Bazaine's, Ladmirault's and Frossard's Corps, with part of
Canrobert's, were concentrating there.

The Great Bubble was sagging pitifully.  The weather was wet and
chilly, the Imperial troops not yet in action were disheartened by
the news of battles lost.  Their equipment was incomplete, their new
boots had proved to be of no better material than brown paper and
American cloth.  Worst of all, the Commissariat, always inadequate,
showed signs of caving in.  And the blame for all was heaped upon the
shoulders of the Emperor, whose faith in his fortunate star had quite
deserted him; a man tormented by telegrams of wifely censure and
wifely advice from Paris; disgruntled, if ever man was; haunted and
oppressed by premonitions of impending disaster; sleepless, shaky,
sick, and prematurely old.

The taking of the fortresses of Bitche and Phalsbourg--memorable by
reason of its brave Governor's resolute defense--the seizure of the
undefended City of Nancy, the Zorn Valley railway line, Forbach with
its immense military stores, Sarreguemines, and other garrison towns
were lesser shocks, falling on a mind already paralyzed.  Hasty
decisions, contradictory orders, had emanated, one after another,
from the Headquarters.  He was confused and flurried, finding his
good brother of Prussia so near.  For the Warlock, scenting a
movement of French troops to the rear, had crowned the uplands
eastward of Metz with the 1st and 7th Corps of the First Army of
Germany under the veteran General Steinmetz, cavalry well to the fore
and outposts skillfully posted, so as to look into the French
position from all points of view, while the Red Prince felt for a
solid footing for his Second Army on the left or French bank of the
Moselle.  Meanwhile, the Crown Prince, whose clutches Marshal
MacMahon had evaded by taking a vast circuit to Châlons, had swept
round and was marching northward from Vigneulles toward Metz.

Ah! in what a hornet's nest the Imperial Commander-in-Chief found
himself.  Almost incapable of mental effort, he recognized, like Mr.
Wilkins Micawber,--whose epistolary style is occasionally suggested
by his Proclamations and harangues,--that something had to be done at
once.  To shake off the intolerable burden of authority was the most
urgent necessity.  He transferred it to the youngest of his Marshals,
Bazaine.

"You will get us out of this, won't you, Marshal?" cried an officer
of the Imperial Staff, as the new Commander-in-Chief came out of the
Prefecture.

The Marshal had left his Imperial master in bed, expecting answers to
letters he had penned to the Emperor of Austria and the King of
Italy, soliciting aid and alliance, which these potentates did not
bestow.  True to himself, he could not quit Metz without a
proclamation, penned in the old flourishing, ambiguous style:

"Inhabitants of Metz.  In leaving you to oppose the invading enemy, I
rely upon your patriotism to defend this great city.  You will not
allow the foreigner to seize this bulwark of France, and you will
emulate the Army in courage and devotion....  I hope to return in
happier times to thank you for your noble conduct."

Then he quitted the place with his son, his cousin and his personal
following and escort.  As his _cortège_ clattered through the streets
choked with soldiers, guns, provision-carts and baggage-wagons, and
faces of contempt, or derision, or hatred turned to see, did he hide
his sick, humiliated face behind the green silk screen of the
carriage window?  How did he answer the inevitable questions of his
son?

A prey to hideous uncertainties, for the new Commander-in-Chief had
suddenly applied to be superseded, the luckless Emperor spent the
night at the camp at Longeville, waking upon a foggy morning--if he
could be said to sleep, who never slept--to a brisk salute of
Prussian guns.  For a patrol of Uhlans with a half battery had made,
during the night, a bold attempt to seize upon the Imperial person,
and being foiled within an ace of success, had retreated, plumping a
shell or so into the lines from the German side of the river.  And
while these hornets were being repulsed with heavy metal, the muddy,
travel-stained Army of the Red Prince crossed the river lower down;
the little episode described having diverted attention from their
transit; effected, even as in a jam of batteries, battalions,
squadrons, baggage and ammunition-trains, the French retreat was
being made.

So choked were the roads that the Emperor and his suite with the
Imperial Guard Escort only managed to struggle as far as Gravelotte,
a village some eight miles from Metz, where Bazaine had his
headquarters:

"Gentlemen, we will remain here, but keep the baggage packed!" had
been the Emperor's instructions to his following upon alighting at
the inn, where two miserable bedrooms were with difficulty obtained
for himself and his son.  Prince Napoleon and the other personages of
the suite found harborage at various cottages; the lackeys slept in
the baggage-fourgons, it may be hazarded.  For in the morning these
vehicles and their attendants were found to have disappeared.  They
had departed for Verdun, whither their master was now to follow them.
Bazaine, who could not shuffle off his now detested responsibilities,
was summoned, to find the Imperial carriage standing in readiness
before the tavern door.




XL

One can see the splendid bays, clamping their bits of solid silver,
their sleek skins and their costly harness glittering in the sunshine
that had driven the early morning fogs away, the postilions and
outriders in their green and gold liveries sitting in the saddle, the
landaus of the suite drawn up at the distance prescribed by etiquette.

Everybody was breakfastless, save the Emperor, his son, and cousin,
and their immediate following.  The regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique,
the gorgeous Cent Gardes in gold-crested, crimson-tufted, silver
helmets with flowing white horsetails and caped cloaks of azure, were
empty of all but air, like their own famous kettledrums.  Their
horses had cropped a little grass in the fields during the night's
bivouac, and were better off than their riders, by one meal.

The young Prince Imperial looked sulky and discontented, but neat and
soldierlike in his new uniform of a subaltern of infantry.  Prince
Jerome Napoleon, the portly M. Plon-Plon of the Crimean War
caricatures, wore a cocked hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and
was buttoned up in a military cloak.

The Emperor had suffered in the night, for a traveler who had slept
in an attic above his bedroom had heard him pacing to and fro and
groaning.  He wore a black-caped, red-lined waterproof cloak over the
uniform of a General of Division; a glimpse of the Star of the Legion
of Honor fastened on his breast showed as he raised his hand to throw
away the butt of the inseparable cigarette, and set his neat little
polished gold-spurred boot on the carriage-step, and beckoned with a
small white-kid-gloved hand.

Obeying this signal, a green-and-gold equerry and a demure elderly
valet hoisted him respectfully on one side, while a keen-eyed,
lean-jawed young man, accurately attired in deep black, propped him
scientifically upon the other.  We know this deft and silent
personage to have been a brilliant young Paris surgeon, retained
about the person of the Emperor; a specialist whose ministrations, in
dulling unbearable pain with subcutaneous injections of morphia, and
combating the progress of disease by skilled surgical treatment,
became more necessary every day.

They got him in.  The sweat was starting through the rouge upon his
livid face as he sank heavily upon the seat of the carriage.  His son
and cousin followed.  Bazaine,--who was accompanied by Canrobert and
Bourbaki, and did not dismount, rode up to receive his master's
farewells.

He did not entreat again to be relieved of the supreme
responsibility.  Perhaps the Emperor imagined that he might.  For he
put out his hand in haste and shook the Marshal's, reiterating:

"All will go well!  Excellently, I have no doubt of it!  You
understand, you have broken the spell."

Of ill-luck, did he mean, clinging to the fatalist whose Star was on
the point of setting.  He added:

"I go to Verdun and Châlons.  Put yourself upon the road for Châlons
as soon as possible....  May you be fortunate!  _Au revoir!  En
avant!_"

The brigadier-general in charge of the escort gave the word.  The
Advance was sounded, the Chasseurs on their gray Arabs dashed onward,
riding in fours, keeping a sharp lookout for Uhlans.  A half-troop of
Cent Gardes preceded the Emperor's carriage, his equerries and aides
and those of the Prince's household followed on their empty, chafing
beasts.  Another _peloton_ of Cent Gardes were succeeded by three
Imperial carriages containing the surgeon, secretaries and valets;
grooms followed with led horses; and the Empress's regiment of
Dragoons, brass-helmeted, black-plumed warriors, in green with white
plastrons, brought up the rear.


It was four o'clock in the morning when they started.  Deep defiles
rather than roads, with wooded, precipitous banks, stretch between
Metz and Gravelotte.  By the time the Imperial _cortège_ had
extricated itself from the stray columns and batteries choking these,
and the cliffy banks had lowered to hedgerows, it was six o'clock and
a gloriously sunny morning.

One may imagine, as the landscape broadened and smoothed like a human
face relieved from carking anxiety, the young Prince Imperial turning
in his seat, and looking back upon the scene he was unwillingly
quitting, with a scowl of resentment and dissatisfaction that changed
and aged his boyish face.

He saw the white tents of the huge camps of the Imperial Divisions
snowing over a vast area of country on the French side of the river,
and the clotting of cavalry and infantry in swarms upon the roads,
where vast aggregations of baggage and provisions and ambulance
wagons impeded their passage.  He saw the Imperial Standard break out
above the Tricolor on the flagstaff of the Fort of Plappeville,
signifying that Bazaine had entered.  He could see the
artillery-batteries on the high ground at Rezerieulles, and he knew
that others were posted behind the woods of Genivaux, and yet others
near the quarries of Amanvilliers.  The glitter of steel and the
flutter of red and white lance-pennons told of the Light Cavalry
outposts at St. Ruffine.  And sinister moving specks upon the
hill-crests beyond the river above St. Barbe--and others moving in
the villages, with darker, bigger patches toward Sarrebourg,
testified, like the gray-white drifts of powder-smoke that came down
upon the northeast breeze, with the reduplicated rattle of musketry,
the detonation of field-guns and the yapping of mitrailleuses--to the
near, active presence of the ancient, racial foe.

_He_ was drawing nearer, always nearer, to the coveted key-city of
the Two Rivers, seated within her ancient fortifications, guarding
the northeast frontiers of France.  _He_ wanted Metz, with her vast
modern arsenal, her huge hospitals and military colleges, her fifteen
bridges--(the railway-bridge had been blown up by Bazaine's engineers
on the night before last, when the squadron of Uhlans, greatly
daring, had made their way into the French lines, with the project of
seizing upon the person of papa)--and her glorious Cathedral, whose
vast gray bulk was now bathed in the misty golden sunshine of a
perfect autumn day.

Soon, soon, those indomitable dark blue soldiers would be at grips
with Frenchmen for the possession of Metz.  Oh! not to be able to
fire a shot, or strike a blow with her defenders, because of one's
pitiable weakness and youth!  Oh! to be perpetually guarded and
protected and plucked from the very possibility of danger, because
one happened to be Heir to the Imperial Throne.

Why had the Emperor resigned the supreme command of the Army?  There
had been reverses--does a Commander-in-Chief give up for that?  True,
he was not well, but the First Napoleon had fought battles and won
them, in spite of cramps and colic.  _He_ would never have driven
away under the noses of King Wilhelm and Count Bismarck and the
Prince Commanders.  He would have called the nephew who could commit
such an _impair_ as that a _godichon_.  He would have said: "To the
devil with you, who boast yourself of my blood!  A Napoleon--and not
a general!  You might have proved yourself a fighter, at least!"

The soldiers regarded the Emperor's resignation as the Great Napoleon
would have done.  They had not cried "_Vive l'Empereur!_" when papa
had driven out of Metz.  Upon the contrary, they had maintained
silence, scowling or sneering covertly.  To-day, the meanest
piou-piou had presumed to wink or grin.  More, voices from the depths
of company-columns had called out horrible insults; things that had
made the son's teeth set and his fists clench with the passionate
desire to thrash the offenders, yet had not twitched one muscle in
the father's impassive face....

"Why do you look back so often, Louis?  What are you thinking about?"

The Emperor's question brought the young head round.  He muttered,
twisting the gold knot of his little sword:

"I am looking at the Army, and at Metz--and at those Uhlan outposts.
And I want to know why we are going away--just because the Prussians
are coming?  Why cannot we stay--and fight?"

The diplomatic, evasive answer came:

"Because for the present it is more prudent that we should withdraw
ourselves."

The boy shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and his young face took on an
expression of heavy obstinacy, bringing out, quite startlingly, a
resemblance to the sire.  He muttered:

"All very well....  But it isn't nice to--absquatulate!"

The slang term _filer_ might be rendered as above.  The Emperor's
gray face with the patches of rouge on the flaccid cheeks moved not a
muscle.  Turning his hunched shoulders upon the scene of his horrible
humiliations, he stared with fixed eyes along the road to Verdun,
stretching away to the west between its bordering poplars, whose long
blue shadows--the day being yet young--barred the white dust rather
suggestively.

At Etain, where the _cortège_ halted for breakfast, the Prince had a
much nearer view of those ubiquitous horsemen in the dark blue
uniforms.  Indeed, the Emperor and his suite barely escaped a
surprise, and the escort of Cent Gardes, who were here replaced by
some of MacMahon's Chasseurs d'Afrique, were hotly chased and sniped
at on the way back to camp.

Through the journey of that night, performed in the cushionless plank
seats of a third-class carriage, his suite being accommodated in a
string of cattle-trucks, of what did the sleepless Emperor think?
What questions occupied that sick and sluggish brain?

The question of returning to Paris, the refuge he longed for and yet
dreaded inexpressibly.  The question as to whether the Empress Regent
would welcome the Emperor who could no longer rule the State, and
what kind of ovation the people would extend to the General who had
deserted the Army of Metz before the advancing hordes of United
Germany.

Would not Rebellion, Anarchy and Revolution rear up their hydra-heads
to greet the Third Napoleon, reëntering his capital?  Would his reign
end in the explosion of a bomb, and a shower of torn flesh and
scattered blood upon the paving-stones?  Would his son ever wear the
Imperial crown, won by bribery, bloodshed, fraud and trickery?  Would
the Church forgive the rape of temporal power?  Would Heaven succor
one who had defrauded Her?  Was this the beginning of the end?

Lugubrious doubts like these and many others haunted his sleepless
pillow in the Imperial pavilion of the camp on the dusty plains of
Champagne.  Dismantled at the close of the October maneuvers, and now
hastily prepared for the Emperor's reception, the place was damp,
dismal, and cheerless, as such places usually are.

The newly levied troops were showing signs of insubordination; the
Gardes Mobiles from Paris were in open mutiny against their generals.
The great camp was a wasp's nest, which the presence of the Emperor
stirred to frenzy; the lewd songs in which he figured, the yells of
savage laughter greeting obscene jests leveled at him and his,
reached him, pacing the mildewed carpets underneath the damp-stained
draperies festooned from the claws of Imperial eagles, whose gilding
was tarnished and discolored, like the Imperial central crown.

All night he paced, on thorns.  With the dawn of day he had the
answer to his questions.  From the Empress, who wished him to
abdicate that she might reign for her son; from the new War Minister,
a creature of his own aggrandizing, who by influencing the Empress,
who detested him, dreamed of becoming another Richelieu; from the
Prefect of Police--who indeed brought the warning in person--came a
triple sentence of exile for the sick, dejected man.

Spewed forth again upon the road toward the northern frontier, he was
a clog upon the feet of the army that might, by a movement in which
boldness combined with rapidity, have relieved Bazaine at the
critical moment and changed the fate of France.  Thenceforth he was
to be a passive witness, rather than a participator, in scene after
scene of horrible disaster; disgraces, disillusions, defeats,
crowding one upon the other, to be crowned by the unspeakable
catastrophe of Sedan.




XLI

Three hours after the Emperor had driven out of Gravelotte the Red
Prince had blocked the direct road to Verdun.  The First Army had
crossed the Moselle.  Moltke and the Royal Headquarter Staff were
already at Pont à Mousson, the Crown Prince was marching toward
Châlons.

At this stage of the game, the Warlock gave the signal.  Von Redern's
guns opened suddenly on the French cavalry camp near Vionville.  You
remember the squadrons were watering: Murat's Dragoons stampeded with
their baggage-trains, De Gramont's troopers sent in a volley of
carbine-fire, mounted and retired in less haste.  This was the
opening figure of the three days of bloody conflict waged in the
rural tract between the northern edges of the Bois de Vaux and the
Forest of Jaumont.  The French call it the "Battle of St. Privat,"
the Germans the battle of Gravelotte-St. Privat.

The Great Headquarters of the Prussian Commander-in-Chief were at the
riverside town of Pont à Mousson, some ten miles distant from the
war-theater--whose stage occupied some six square miles of
undulating, wooded, ravine-gashed country-side.

And here, his possessing genius, or demon, prompting him, the tactics
of Moltke abruptly changed.

I have fancied the Warlock getting up at cockcrow on the day of
Vionville,--he had a little folding camp-bed he always slept upon.
Undressed to shirt and drawers, he would roll himself in a
gray-striped blanket which did not reveal the fact when it needed
washing, and cover himself on chilly nights with a big, shabby,
military cloak.

Beside the bed, with the extinguished candle-lantern, standing on a
corner of it, was the little portable campaign-table, covered with
faded green baize.  His maps were spread on this, and an Army
revolver of large caliber lay atop of them, well within reach of its
owner's practiced hand.

He sponged his old face and sinewy neck economically in a basin of
cold water, carefully washed his hands, rinsed his mouth and put on a
clean white shirt.  A white drill waistcoat went on under the old
red-faced uniform frock, with the distinctive shoulder-cords of
Chieftaincy of the Great General Staff and the Order of Merit
dangling from the silver-gilt swivel at the collar.  Then he polished
his bald head with his silk handkerchief, reached his wig from the
chest of drawers and assumed it, read a text in his Lutheran Bible,
prayed a twenty-second prayer standing: lighted a thin, dry,
ginger-colored cigar, such as his soul loved, and sat down to work at
his maps.

Bismarck might well have likened him to some bird of the predatory
species.  With the rising furrows of his bald brow hitching up his
wig, and his clear eyes, lashless with old age, crimson-rimmed by
dint of fatigue and overstrain, his fierce hooked beak following the
journey of his withered claw over the tough cartridge-paper--one can
imagine him, very like an eagle, or a member of the vulture-tribe.

It grew lighter as he worked with his old chronometer and well-used
compasses and stumpy pencils; and the little thumbed table of
distance-measures to which he sometimes referred.  He finished and
rang his handbell for his orderly-servant; chatted with his Adjutant
and secretary as he broke his fast on bread and black coffee.  Then
at a great jingling of cavalry bridles and stamping of iron hoofs
upon the cobblestones below, he went down, carrying his rolled
map-case, mounted, and rode away with his following.

The sun rising had found him, lean, inscrutable and silent, on the
ridge above Flavigny, where he had told Prince Charles and Steinmetz,
Moltke would be found that day....

He had met and primed them with the result of his calculations, had
seen a fierce engagement from his coign of observation.  By three
noon, he was back at Pont à Mousson, had interviewed the King, dined
frugally, and now stood chatting with the Iron Chancellor upon the
steps of the Mairie.

Guns were muttering in the distance as they had done all day at
intervals.  There had been fighting, he answered mildly when
questioned.  Quite a considerable battle one might call it.  The
villages of Flavigny and Vionville were burning as he spoke.

The potato-gardens of Flauville were thick-strewn with corpses of
French and German foot-soldiers.  In a little, layer upon layer of
dead and dying men and horses had been piled upon these.  Necessity
knows no law; and it had been found necessary to interpose Prussian
cavalry between the French Artillery and exhausted masses of German
infantry.  Which accounted for a considerable thinning in the ranks
of Rauch's Hussars.

The sacrifice had been necessary.  He told himself so as he stood
there smoking.  His high forehead was quite unclouded as he returned
in answer to some reference to MacMahon's losses at Wörth:

"It is one of the traditions handed down from the days of Murat and
Kellerman and Lassalle--the French belief in the virtue of the massed
cavalry charge...."

The Minister to whom he spoke replied:

"The English exploded the theory at Balaklava sixteen years ago, by
their magnificent but useless sacrifice of Cardigan's Light Brigade.
They learned then, and we have profited by the lesson that MacMahon
has just been spanked for forgetting--and that Your Excellency will
presently teach Bazaine...."

The great strategist cupped his long chin in his lean hand, and said
in his dry, thoughtful way:

"Yes, yes.  We will drub this precept into his brain at cost of his
breeches.  _Regiments of mounted men serve admirably for the
protection of marching Army Corps--are priceless for reconnaissance,
outpost and patrol-work, but when they are thrown against vast bodies
of troops armed with the modern breech-loader, their use is
unjustifiable, being nil._"

"And when in addition, the unlucky horsemen are charged as at Wörth,
over hop-poles and tree-stumps, open field-drains and shattered
garden walls," said the Minister, "then they are worse than useless,
I should add."

The Warlock's thin-lipped mouth opened in a silent laugh that creased
his lean cheeks and displayed the gums that were all but toothless.
He rubbed his hairless chin and said:

"Ay, unless from the point of view of that farmer of
Schleswig-Holstein who said as our troops marched by his barn-yard:
'Let us look on them as manure for next year's wheat!'"

The Iron Chancellor's blue eyes hardened with sudden anger.  Imagine
him in his great muddy jack-boots, with cord breeches not innocent of
clay and soil, the black double-breasted frock with pewter buttons
and yellow collar and cuff-facings, the white cap with the yellow
band and the long, heavy, steel-hilted cavalry sword, puffing at a
giant cigar as he stood on the doorsteps of the Mairie, over whose
door drooped the Prussian flag, and the white Hohenzollern pennon
with the Black Eagle and the gold blazoning, showing, like the
bodyguard of Red Dragoons and White Cuirassiers, the numerous
orderlies, and the double cordon of sentries placed about the
building, that there lodged the King.  While the Red Prince's
headquarters were distinguished in similar fashion at the National
Bank of France.

"I have not forgotten!"  The response came in Bismarck's grimmest
vein of humor.  "Nor has the rascal either, if he happens to be alive
still.  Our infantry taught him very thoroughly that there are more
uses than one for a bundle of straw."

"Some of our German Princes have mastered that lesson quite recently,
Excellency," said Count Paul Hatzfeldt, First Secretary of the
ambulatory Foreign Office, turning a handsome, humorous face upon his
Chief.  "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg slept in a barn at the last
halting-place, and Prince Leopold of Bavaria in a loft over a stable
yard, where, as he explained afterward, there were not only mice, but
rats!"

"I understand His Excellency to refer," said Moltke, taking a pinch
of stuff, "to the Polish method of flogging, which is to tie a man
face-downward on a truss and thrash him to a jelly with green
birch-rods."

"Precisely.  Only not having birch rods 'convenient' as Lever's
Irishmen would say," returned the Chancellor, "our fellows used their
belts--buckle-end preferably.  Then they pitched the farmer on his
own dunghill, and left him to rot there for the land in spring."

"Severe, but severe lessons are best remembered," said the Warlock,
placidly.  "Thus MacMahon will perhaps throw no more regiments of
cavalry away!  As for ourselves, we have hardly brought that arm of
the Service to its present condition of usefulness to handle it
wastefully.  Military science--true military science--does not allow
of undue extravagance in the sentient material of war.  Nay,--it will
never be said of me that I wasted blood prodigally!"  He curved his
long thin hand about his large and beautifully shaped ear, and added,
as the distant detonations of heavy artillery made the windows rattle
in their sashes and the pavement quake underfoot.  "They are still
fighting south and west of Metz.  In half an hour, if the firing has
not abated, I am going to ride in that direction with the King."

He glanced at his chronometer, then went down the side steps, and
strolled, contentedly smoking, to where his own charger and his
master's were waiting in charge of some orderlies near the Royal
carriages and fourgons that occupied the center of the Market Place.
While Count Hatzfeldt, glancing after the thin figure, shrugged and
said to his Chief in an undertone:

"Heaven send that by this time to-morrow we may not be deploring some
tremendous holocaust of Prussian cavalry!  Do not ask me how the idea
suggested itself...."

"Possibly,"--the Minister slightly moved his hand toward a string of
country grain-wagons, crowded with wounded, and drawn by farmers'
horses, converging from the westward boulevard toward the Market
Place--"possibly because so many of those fellows have been brought
in here since twelve noon.  And in Moltke's very disclaimer of
blood-waste, you find cause of suspicion.  In that case, our greatest
strategist would be like the spider, who agitates her web to conceal
herself before she has even been seen.  Moreover, they--I refer to
our wounded--have been infantry of the Third Corps chiefly, nearly
all Prussians from the Mark of Brandenburg.  The French prisoners
were mostly horsemen; Light Blue Lancers and Cuirassiers of the Guard
Imperial.  What fellows are these?"  Under his heavy brows he
scrutinized the approaching train of sufferers, adding: "H'm!
Marshal Frossard's chassepotiers have taken toll of Rauch's Hussars
with a vengeance!  Where are you going, Count, in such haste?"

Halfway down the steps Hatzfeldt halted, dropping his eyeglass and
turning round an astonished face.

"Going, Excellency?  Why, naturally, to speak to these wounded
cavalry men.  My wife has a cousin, a captain in the Hussars of
Rauch."

The Chancellor said, bending his powerful gaze on the handsome face
of the diplomatic dandy:

"Let me counsel you to quench your desire for information.  The
King's windows are overhead.  And the inquiries natural for you to
make in your own character will be suspected, should His Majesty
observe them--to have been prompted by me."  He showed a corner of
the sealed dispatch he had thrust into his pocket.  "You recognize
the Queen's handwriting upon this envelope?  Augusta will have
written another such Jeremiad to her spouse.  Mercy and moderation,
piety and philanthropy will be the headings of the sermon penned on
my own sheets of letter-paper.  The test of the King's will be,
'_Bismarck is alone to blame!_'  Fortunately my back is broad, and I
have his entire confidence....  But if he once suspected me of
getting what the Yankees call 'cold feet!'..."

The hand that held the cigar indicated a stoppage of the foremost
wagon.  "See!  Moltke is speaking to the officer in charge of the
convoy.  I will wager you a case of champagne that his mouth is being
corked up.  A wise proceeding too!  For, remember, the story of a
wounded man is painted from his own wounds--always a red tale of
disaster.  How can it be otherwise?  In the heat of battle, or
perhaps without having fired one shot, or ridden one charge--he has
been struck down, poor wretch! and carried, bleeding, from the
field....  Has it occurred to Your Excellency that those guns are
drawing nearer?"

The query was addressed to Moltke, who had returned, leaving the
wagon-train to jolt with its doleful load in the direction where the
Flag of the Geneva Cross, hanging from doors and windows, announced
the location of temporary hospitals.

The expert listened as distant crashes of volley-firing were answered
by the hyena-yapping of mitrailleuses, and answered, pointing to the
weather-vane on the tower of the Market Hall:

"Your Excellency is wrong.  The breeze has altered its direction.  It
was northerly, and is now blowing directly from the west.  Yet if the
action should assume grave proportions, it may prove necessary to
shift Headquarters to some village further afield."

"Heaven forbid!" murmured Count Hatzfeldt, expressively raising his
fine eyebrows, "when one is able to get a decent dinner, and a daily
bath at one's hotel!..."

"Heaven generally ordains, through the mouth of Your Excellency, an
exodus," said the Chancellor, laughing, "when a comfortable bed falls
to my lot.  At Herny my couch had to be lengthened with chairs and
carriage-cushions, and these kept parting company all the night long.
My feet were on the floor when I awakened in the morning,--literally
at cockcrow--for my window opened upon the dunghill where the lord of
the poultry-yard sounded his reveillé.  Now here I am accommodated in
quite respectable fashion; in a little red creeper-covered house at
the corner of the Rue Raugraf, and three of the Councillors are
stowed under the same roof with me."

"While I," said the Warlock, "have my quarters at a cleanly bakery,
where there is quite an excellent piano, by the way.  So that,
to-night, unless Fate order otherwise, I shall hear my nephew Henry
von Burt sing some of my favorite songs.  He is in voice for the
first time since his attack of sore throat.  The King has been much
pleased with his rendering of Herder's '_Volkslieder_' and '_Die
Blumen_ of Heine, which doubtless Your Excellency knows."

"I am acquainted with the song you mention.  Or I was," returned the
Chancellor, "in my salad days.  They are over for me, unluckily! ...
Only Your Excellency possesses the secret of perpetual youth."

And he turned aside to receive a bulky sealed packet of dispatches
from a green-jacketed Royal Courier, who had just driven into the
Market Place in a farmer's gig, and now got down, tossing a fee to
the scowling driver of the muddy, panting roadster.  While Moltke
stood smiling and humming with characteristic untunefulness a stave
of the tender, sentimental ballad:

  "_If they knew it, the little flowers,
  How she wounded this bleeding heart,
  They would weep with me in bright dew-showers,
  Healing, healing its anguished smart!_"


Said the Minister in an undertone to Hatzfeldt, as he transferred to
his keeping the bulky sealed envelope received from the courier:

"Let his Excellency sing only loud enough, and neither Steinmetz nor
the Red Prince will be able to prevent the music-loving Frenchmen
from retiring upon Verdun."

He had not meant the pungent jest to reach the ear of the great
strategist.  But Moltke glanced round and answered mildly, if with a
narrowing of his wrinkled eyelids, and a sardonic twist of his thin,
dry lips:

"Then all the more surely should we surround and annihilate them.  My
second plan is usually stronger than my first.  And I have already
issued instructions to Prince Frederick Charles and General
Steinmetz, indicating the course they are to follow should Bazaine
pierce our left wing.  Meanwhile let us listen to this fellow's
singing.  It may please Your Excellency better than mine!"

The arrival, a Captain of Dragoons of the Prussian Guard, acting as
_aide-de-camp_ upon the staff of Steinmetz, had just galloped into
Pont à Mousson, accompanied by an escort of half a dozen troopers on
blown horses, and had little breath left even for speech.  But when
he threw himself from his reeking beast, the dispatch he took from
his belt-pouch and handed to the Chief of the Great Staff told of a
huge expenditure of "the sentient material of war."


At noon of the day, looking from his point of observation on the high
ground between the Bois des Ognons and Gravelotte, short-legged,
fiery-tempered Steinmetz had seen what seemed a weak spot in the
French position.  Under cannon, mitrailleuse and chassepot-fire he
had ordered several batteries of the 7th Corps and Von Hartmann's
Division of Cavalry to cross the Gravelotte defile and plant
themselves on the slopes south of the road.  Death had harvested
redly from the extravagant movement.  The slaughter that ensued had
shaken even the men who carried the needle-gun, their huge columns
were giving ground.  General Steinmetz and his staff were under heavy
fire.  Only the Prussian field-batteries, served and trained by
gunner-sharpshooters, kept the German right wing from caving in.

Heavy news, one would suppose, yet the Warlock read the dispatch to
his master with as placid an expression as though he were at that
moment seated beside the baker's excellent piano, listening to the
tender warblings of the melodious Henry von Burt.

"Steinmetz is over ardent, it may be, yet it is what I should have
done, had I been in his place," he said in answer to some perturbed
exclamation of King Wilhelm.  "Only, perhaps," he fingered his long
chin thoughtfully, "I should have done it in a different way.  He is
supported by now.  Stülpnagel will have thrown his Division forward
and gripped the woods and heights upon the French left.  Your Majesty
will see a change in our favor by the time we have reached the
ground!"

"Your Excellency should be there now and I with you.  Pray order the
horses!" urged the agitated King.

"They are waiting, sire!" said the Warlock, cool, calm, and
inscrutable as ever.  In fact, he hummed another bar or two of the
plaintive ballad about the weeping flowers as he followed his Royal
master downstairs to the door, and the War Minister, Von Roon, who
had been hastily sent for, rode up with his staff as the King mounted
his steadiest charger, a powerful black horse.

"The Federal Chancellor, Count von Bismarck Schönhausen, begs
permission to accompany your Majesty!" said Hatzfeldt, gracefully
approaching as the orderly of the Body-guard resigned the bridle-rein.

He said to himself as he returned with the graciously accorded
permission to where the Minister waited by the big brown mare that
was held by an orderly of Cuirassiers:

"How perfect is his discretion!  How completely he hides the iron
grip of power under the velvet glove of diplomacy!  Roon is the
King's quartermaster-sergeant, Moltke is his calculating machine,
Bismarck is his ruler--but he will always seem his slave!  Wherever
the King goes--on journeys, shooting excursions, visits to
watering-places--he is always at his elbow; he rides with him to
maneuvers, and reviews and parades.  Since the War began--and at cost
of what exertion, mental and bodily, no one understands better than I
do!--he has never left his master alone for long enough to further
the intrigues and influence of other men....  Every battle-field the
King looks on will be seen through the Chancellor's eyes.  For this
War is _his_ War--and he knows it! ... Here come galloping the
Royalties and Serene Highnesses, rabid to see some real fighting....
Bismarck calls them the Tinsel Rabble,--if only they knew!"

And Count Paul, smiling in his gently satirical fashion, strode back
to his quarters to pen to his young, pretty, and exceedingly
coquettish Countess, a marital letter full of tender expressions and
requests for lots more cigarettes.  While their Highnesses and
Mightinesses of the Royal Suite pranced away in the wake of the King
and his three great servants, without the slightest idea that the
Chancellor who rode on William's left hand held them in such contempt.

The wounded men sitting or lying on hay in the grain-carts at the
hospital door looked up as the Great Headquarter Staff rode by and
gave a shaky Hoch! of greeting.  Heads of dressers, nurses, Knights
of St. John, and surgeons appeared at windows from which projected
the Flag with the Red Cross.  While a long train of haggard French
prisoners, halted before the porch of the church that had been
converted into a temporary prison, stared with lackluster eyes over
the bowls of cabbage-soup and the huge hunches of bread that had been
distributed among them by pitying ladies; and a battalion of little
black-a-vised, green-coated Saxon soldiers who had marched in
dead-beat and were dozing on straw under the Market Hall, lifted
their heads from their knapsacks, saying: "There goes Moltke with his
King, and the Big Pomeranian.  Something is up out yonder!" and
rolled over to sleep again....

The inhabitants and tradespeople of Pont à Mousson were too crushed
to make any audible comments.  Within a fortnight they had had twice
to feed and quarter a French Division.  Now here, as it seemed, was
the whole Prussian Army poured out upon them.

They were dumb and stupefied in the Babel of foreign dialects.  They
could make no headway against the flood.  Everywhere were loud-voiced
Intendants making requisitions and giving orders; officers and
quartermaster-sergeants shouting for rooms, provender and stabling;
the men, like the officers, insatiable in demands for meat, bread,
forage, tobacco, flour and wine, liberal in oaths and blows to those
who could not satisfy their needs.

Tradesmen in gutted shops swore in whispers over basketsful of dirty
little nickel coins with (to them) indecipherable inscriptions--all
they had to show in return for one or two thousand francs' worth of
stock.  To grumble brought retribution, swift, sharp and merciless,
on the head of the grumbler.  To resist meant death.  Therefore they
would be silent until the invader should have passed on.

But when the wearers of the muddy blue uniforms and the riders of the
muddy, well-fed horses did pass, fresh hosts came swarming after
them.  There seemed no end to the brown-faced men in the loathed blue
uniform....

"Are there more to come?" those of them who understood French--and
many did--were asked timidly, and they answered: "Naturally.  We are
only the Advance.  To keep the roads by which we have passed open,
and to guard the telegraph-wires we have left behind us there will be
very many more required!"

Germany was being emptied into France's lap, it seemed to the
bewildered peasants leaning against the walls of their cottages or
peering from the doorways, as had done the peasants of
Alsace-Lorraine.  They, like them, were ruined, their crops
devastated by cataclysms of armed humanity, their cellars emptied,
their frugal stores devoured.

"But where are we to find food for all these, we who had fared badly
enough before they came?  And who will pay us for what they have not
paid for, or give cash for this stuff called money that they have
left behind?  Will it be the King or the Emperor?" some haggard man
or woman, reckless with despair and misery, would demand with frantic
gestures.  "And how shall we feed our children when they leave us
nothing?  How live at all when they live upon us?"

They asked this less often when the Flag with the Geneva Cross
appeared above roofs and thrust out of windows of buildings
appropriated as hospitals, and when long trains of German
ambulance-wagons and hay-carts full of wounded men in blue uniforms
began to pass by, as well as piteous processions of French wounded
and French prisoners....

"You see, they die!" they presently began to tell each other.
"Frenchmen are being killed like flies out yonder where you hear the
cannon, but not Frenchmen only.  These too, die....  MacMahon has
failed us and the cursed Emperor has run away for fear of Bismarck,
and Bazaine may prove a rotten staff for France to lean on.  But if
our generals have forgotten how to lead, the Army of France has not
forgotten how to fight, and thousands upon thousands of Prussians
have been killed since the beginning of the War.  They dig their
great trenches so quickly and bury the slain in such haste that the
greatness of their losses will never be really known.  When they
would hide them more completely, they heap up corpses in farmers'
barns, and pile the farmers' straw and hay and faggots about them,
and pour on petroleum and tar and set fire to it--and thus their dead
are consumed to ashes--and sometimes the yet living with the dead!"


As at Paris, spy-fever raged in cities, towns and villages, while the
armies of the invader plowed bleeding furrows in the flank of
prostrate France.  For the Prussian Secret Intelligence Department
had its emissaries everywhere.  Hotels, public bureaus, railway
stations, shops, offices, even clubs, had harbored them unknowingly.
Now they cropped up on all sides, speaking French with the Gallic
accent, their German brains full of neatly pigeon-holed and docketed
information, ready to place themselves at the disposal of their
friends.  Hence, patriotic Frenchmen, favored by chance or heredity
with blue eyes, fair hair, ruddy complexions and the advantage as to
inches over their neighbors, found themselves cold-shouldered by
their intimates and subjected to unpleasantly suspicious scrutiny
when consuming refreshment in _cafés_ and restaurants, or strolling
with their acquaintances on public boulevards.

English artists attached to illustrated newspapers, special
correspondents, handicapped by blonde whiskers and an imperfect
acquaintance with the French language, found themselves in many a
tight place.  "_Mort aux espions!_" is not a cheering cry when some
thousands of red-hot throats are uttering it, and half a dozen
soldiers or gendarmes form the only barrier between the unlucky
suspects and the furious mob.




XLII

A mud-bedaubed nondescript who toiled at the heels of the Great
Headquarter Staff upon a huge velocipede of the big-wheeled,
bone-shaker type prevalent at that remote period, met plenty of
scowling glances from groups of peasants gathered at the corners of
villages and listening by the wayside.  Even on territory occupied by
German troops, it was not safe for lagging soldiers to drop behind
upon the march.  To enter roadside taverns or farmhouses with a
comrade was imprudent, to venture in alone was perilous, the sight of
the German uniform, the sound of the Teutonic gutturals, were so
fiercely abhorred.  Of the reason for this loathing the Englishman
was not ignorant.  Marching with the infantry of the German army, he
had followed where the Uhlans had passed.

He had slept, the night before the Army of the Red Prince had crossed
the river, in a little deserted country château,--an ideal honeymoon
nest for lovers, standing in a high-walled garden full of fruit-trees
and tangled roses in the middle of a sloping meadow on the banks of
the Moselle.

The butt of some Prussian soldier's rifle had served for key to the
locked door in the high garden-wall.  Those who had gone before had
stripped the bushes and espaliers.  The house had been entered, and
the dainty silk-upholstered drawing-room chairs and sofas had been
dragged out into the garden.  The piano--a tiny rosewood
_bijou_--probably a wedding present--and the absurd little
billiard-table with which Monsieur had disported himself, stood
crookedly upon the gravel; a long tear in the green cloth of the one;
prints of tumblers, marks of greasy fingers marring the shiny veneer
of the other.  Bottles that had contained Champagne and
Moselle--butts of cigars, empty tobacco-papers and match-boxes were
scattered everywhere--over gravel, and grass-plot and the once trim
garden-beds.  An impromptu _café_-concert had evidently formed a
feature of the bivouac.

P. C. Breagh had slept in a charming bedroom, under rosebud-chintz
curtains looped with silken ropes, having carved wooden Cupids,
painted pink, instead of tassels.  The bed was not as luxurious as it
might have been, because the blankets and sheets had been carried
off.  Opening his eyes in the gray of morning he had seen himself as
he lay reflected in a long cheval-glass, and failed, for the moment,
to recognize in the bronzed, shaggy, unclean tatterdemalion therein
reflected the young Englishman of respectable appearance who had
interviewed the German States' Chancellor in the Wilhelm-strasse.

He was not alone in the room, that was the next discovery.  A woman,
young and swarthy, dressed in the quaint costume of the country,
stood upon the other side of the bed, with a kitchen chopper in her
lifted right hand.  He took in the chopper at a glance, and promptly
rolled off the bed upon the side facing the friendly cheval-glass,
and stood glowering at the black-eyed girl.

"I have startled Monsieur?  A thousand apologies!"

She forced a smile with her curtsey and backed toward the door.  P.
C. Breagh explained in his French that he was no robber but a
harmless traveler, and that she need not be alarmed.

"Monsieur is very kind!"  Her chopper-hand hidden under her apron,
she explained that she had served as cook in the establishment.  Upon
the news that M. de Bismarck was coming, _tout à coup_, Monsieur and
Madame had gone away together to Paris.  They were noble and very
amiable, but old, old, and feeble....  They had left the little
château in her care....

"Mademoiselle is not easily frightened?" P. C. Breagh hinted.

Said the black-eyed, modestly:

"I am Angéle--nothing of Mademoiselle.  A peasant--like my father,
who was gardener for Monsieur and Madame....  I was alone here when
the Prussian horsemen came, breaking the doors and shutters....
Everything was spoiled, or taken, wine, linen, the fowls in the
poultry-run.  Destitution, ruin everywhere!..."

She accentuated her tale of loss by heavings of the bosom, shrugs of
the fine shoulders, dramatic gestures.

"Then my father returned and found ...  No matter!  Both he and I
should have been silent and endured everything....  It was not wise,
Monsieur, that the old man should have struck a Prussian, even for my
sake.  For then he was beaten.  Whenever I shut my eyes, I see it....
Therefore I have vowed not to sleep again until...."  She opened her
eyes wide, and smiled, rather grimly, then changed the subject with a
wave of the unchoppered and visible hand.  Was Monsieur hungry?  By
searching, a crust of bread might be found in some cupboard, an egg
or two--laid by one of the abducted hens in some private corner--a
pinch of coffee and sugar sufficient for Monsieur!

"I should be glad of it.  But--when you are in such trouble it seems
unfair," protested Monsieur.  He added, reverting to the language of
the country, that he would be happy to pay for the _déjeuner_.

"But no!  A meal for a bird!--Monsieur and Madame will never miss
it!" and Angéle curtseyed herself away, with forced smiles.

Left alone, P. C. Breagh bolted the door and finding water in the
bedroom jugs, and scented soap upon the washstand, enjoyed the luxury
of a comprehensive wash, drying himself, in the absence of towels,
upon a pillow-case.  A pot of cold-cream, tinted a delicate pink and
bearing the label of Piesse and Lubin, he found, and anointed his
blistered feet therewith, and not without pangs of conscience--tore
up the pillow-case and bandaged them.  He would pay the girl for the
damage done to her master's property, he told himself.

He combed his shock of dusty hair with a tortoise-shell comb he
picked up from the carpet, and went downstairs, knapsack in hand.  It
was four o'clock.  The dusty, foot-print and wheel-marked highway
beyond the broken door in the garden-wall was strangely bare and
lonely.  The battalion he had marched with had bivouacked on the
other side of the village.  The troops that would presently follow
were not yet upon the road.

The girl cried out that Monsieur's breakfast was ready.  It had been
laid, looking quite tempting, on one of the little inlaid tables that
stood upon the tiny lawn.  A truncheon of bread, fairly new, a pat of
butter, two eggs, and a bowl of fragrant, steaming milk and
coffee--such a meal as P. C. Breagh had not enjoyed for many a day.

He begged Angéle to share.  She replied with a graceful wave of
abnegation that she had already eaten.  P. C. Breagh expressed
regret, muttered his old Rockhampton grace and savagely fell to.

"Monsieur is Catholic?..."

The movement of his hand, making the sacred Sign, had not escaped
her.  He nodded, with his mouth full, and Angéle turned pale under
her swarthy skin.  Her guest vigorously beheaded an egg and reached
for the coffee-bowl.  The expression of the girl's eyes, as he lifted
it to his mouth, brought something back to him.  He sipped
cautiously--recognized the French equivalent for English
rat-poison--spat forth what he had taken, with a hideous grimace, and
poured the deadly stuff out upon the ground.

Then he got up and looked for Angéle, whose white-frilled cap,
crimson bodice, and striped stuff petticoat had vanished round the
corner of the little hen-house.  He could hear the _klop-klop_ of her
varnished cow-leather clogs receding along paths unknown.

Said P. C. Breagh, speaking with mouth awry, for the intense
bitterness of the alkaloid had dried up tongue and palate:

"I'd like to follow that girl and shake her.  But more than likely
her sweetheart and male relatives are lurking in the neighborhood
with pitchforks, to speed the unwelcome guest."

He went back to the breakfast-table, but the glamour had faded from
the banquet, and the leathery dryness of mouth and throat foiled him
in the effort to finish the egg he had begun.  He pocketed the other,
abandoned the bread and butter as unreliable, strapped on his dusty
knapsack, and was hobbling away upon the sticks that had lately
served him as crutches, when he caught sight of an obviously new
coffin of thin tarred planking, on the gravel near the conservatory
door.  It bore a cross and an inscription roughly scrawled in letters
of white paint:

         |
       --+--
         |
         |

  JOSEPH MARIE MEUNIER,

  AGED 80.

  KILLED BY THE PRUSSIANS,

  AUGUST, 1870.

  ------

  R.I.P.


And then, with a stiffening of every muscle and a cold and deadly
sinking at the heart, the English boy realized that Angéle's father
had been murdered, and knew what had been the unendurable injury that
had provoked the man of eighty to strike in his daughter's defense.
Next instant a gun banged, but the charge of slugs that had been
meant to lodge in P. C. Breagh's cerebellum merely smashed the
conservatory glass and peppered the walls and trees.  The intended
recipient of these favors had previously been lame.  Now, regardless
of blisters and skin cracks, he cast away his improvised crutches,
darted down the garden-path, nipped through the shattered door that
hung upon one twisted hinge, and ran for dear life.

Thenceafter our young friend did not stray too far from the column he
temporarily marched with.  The secret of those haggard eyes and
scowling looks was clear to him now.  And the discovery of a giant
velocipede with the solid rubber tires of the period and a front
wheel of four feet in diameter abandoned in a ditch, presently
enabled him--previously schooled by Mr. Tickling in the management of
a machine of similar construction to outpace the Red Prince's
marching battalions; and--upon highways, keep abreast of his flying
cavalry.

Now, hugely daring, he pounded along in the wake of the Great
Headquarter Staff, guided by the whipping flicker of the black and
white lance-pennons of the Red Uhlans bringing up the rear.

There were troops upon the road....  One or two stray batteries of
artillery, and part of an Engineer Corps going the same way, halted
to give a cheer for the King.  But the galloping dispatch-bearers
with their guards of troopers, bound for Pont à Mousson, meeting the
Great Staff on the way, turned back with it, adding to the clouds of
dust in its wake.

The Doctor had promised P. C. Breagh plenty of raw-head and
bloody-bones whether he marched with the Advance or remained at the
rear.  The prophecy had been verified.  He had not yet seen a battle
or even a battlefield.  But thousands of wounded men, displaying
every sickening mutilation that shot and shell and steel can inflict
upon the human body; thousands upon thousands of prisoners, gaunt
with fatigue, hunger and misery, had passed in an almost unending
panorama before his sickened, pitying eyes.  Ruined châteaux, farms
and churches, crops destroyed or rotting in the ground ungarnered,
villages razed or burned, towns battered out of shape, and
fortifications breached by heavy gunnery, were to become sights of
common occurrence as he traveled the long red road that was to lead
him home at last.


Now he rode and odd lines of songs, comic or tender, fragments of
Fleet Street talk, brain-pictures of things seen or persons
remembered passed through his mind as he pedaled between long lines
of roadside poplars, whitening in the hot breeze that carried the
scorching dust along in clouds.

The face of the peasant girl who had tried to poison him.  By George!
if Mrs. Rousby or Miss Marriott or Mrs. Vezin could have seen her
fierce, gleaming eyes, and her heavy black eyebrows lifted at the
outer corners, and the way a white canine tooth had nipped her red
underlip....  The voice of Mr. Knewbit barking, "Avoid Sham
Technicality and Sentimental Slumgullion," the well-bred voice of
Valverden dealing the unforgotten snub.  The fortune told him by the
gipsy woman on Waterloo Bridge after that unforgettable January
night's vigil: "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road; and
yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it, until the
end, when tute is jasing...."

"When tute is jasing" meant "When thou art going" he had been told so
by a man who knew a bit of Romany.  His imagination made a
grasshopper-leap of years to the death-bed of a celebrated War
Correspondent.--a grim, bronzed man who had followed his arduous
calling in many quarters of the world, and had earned much kudos and
a whole chestful of decorations, but had never married, and was
understood to look with coldness upon the loveliest women, his heart
having been irrevocably given in earlier days.  Juliette--still
young, and ah! how exquisite in maturity--Juliette in widow's weeds,
would hasten to the moribund's side and place her little hand in his,
gaunt and damp with approaching death.  She would hear his story of
faithful, hopeless passion, and close his eyelids for the last long
sleep.  And standing by his pillow, looking pityingly at the dead
face, she would realize that she loved--too late....

He sniffed and gulped as the tears stung his smarting eyelids, so
moving was the picture of that death-bed scene.

A picture of the King of Prussia as he had seen him sitting at the
open window of his lodgings at the Mairie of Pont à Mousson next came
up, with faces of market-people and street-boys gaping round-eyed at
_Le Roi de la Prusse_, who nursed his clean-shaven chin and stared
unwinkingly before him.  Again, the old man, pale, square-shouldered,
capped and tightly-buttoned, riding through the market-place with his
Iron Chancellor by his side.

Wiry, hawk-eyed Moltke and saturnine, shaggy-browed Roon clattered
upon the heels of them, but P. C. Breagh had had eyes only for the
great soldierly figure that bestrode the big brown mare.

Did he not owe his life to the well-shaped hand that had rested on
the thigh of the brown mare's rider, as the Minister bent to speak to
the King?

No common bond of confidence and friendship seemed to unite the
master of seventy-three and the man of fifty-five.  The hard,
somewhat vulpine face of the Hohenzollern, with its drooping,
aquiline nose, narrow light hazel eyes, curled white mustache,
precise, tight-lipped mouth and rounded chin projecting between the
brushed back white whiskers, had been all alight with interest, and
warm with kindliness.

This is what the Man of Iron had said with his small square teeth
showing laughingly under the heavy hair-brake, and his fierce,
prominent blue eyes sparkling with humor and fun:

"The final scenes of melodrama are always the most strenuous.  Your
Majesty must regard the ridge over Flavigny as your Royal box on the
Grand Tier, the occasion as a farewell performance of the French
Empire--played for the benefit of United Germany, before the whole
world!"

Flavigny was a village....  But the flickering black-and-white
pennons that tipped the dust-cloud ahead were slowing....  Three
battalions of infantry, each with its band playing gaily at its head,
the bronzed, healthy-looking, white-powdered men marching eight
abreast, had halted and front-faced as the word of command followed
the sound of the Great Staff trumpeter:

"_Clear the way!  Clear the way!  Here comes the King!_"

And now the scorching air vibrated with their vigorous cheering as
the King cantered by and was gone with a shout and a wave of the hand.

"Our old one takes dust and sun, saddle-blisters and short commons
like any old trooper!" P. C. Breagh heard a Lieutenant say to a
subaltern as the dusty ranks half-wheeled and fell into step once
more.  "He's a precisian too....  _Zum Beispiel_, he called to a man
in Vidler's company that he had got his 'needler' on the wrong
shoulder.  Now that's another thing I like in the old man!..."

"The Field Marshal is taking the Great Headquarters to where it will
be hellishly risky," a Captain with Staff shoulder-cords was saying
to another, as a new outbreak of cannon and mitrailleuse-fire caused
his horse to start and rear.  He added: "They were hard at it at Mars
la Tour, Vionville and Rezonville all day yesterday: the 5th Division
were in action all round Moltke as he stood on the high ridge above
Flavigny....  To-day our 7th and 10th are fighting between Gravelotte
and St. Hubert, where the French have the devil's own array of
battery-emplacements and rifle-pits--our guards are at Doncourt, our
9th and 8th corps are at Verneville and Amanvilliers.  Now the
fighting seems to have rolled down nearer the river.  I have
certainly heard cavalry trumpets sounding the charge, and volleys of
musketry--French, I judge!--coming from that direction.  I should
judge that...."

"Bazaine must have turned the handle in too much of a hurry!"
retorted the junior, who enjoyed a regimental reputation for humor,
and a volley of laughter rattled along the marching files, now
breasting a steep and gravelly hill, half-way up which the rider of
the giant-wheeled velocipede had been compelled to dismount.

P. C. Breagh had seen, reproduced from the _Charivari_ in all the
German illustrated papers, the famous caricature of Cham, over which
King Wilhelm's brown-faced infantrymen were grinning as they climbed
the hill.  Who does not remember the Count de Noë's memorable
presentment of the field of war dotted with defunct Prussians, and
the French mitrailleuse-gunner in the foreground who exclaims in
astonishment: "_Sapristi!_ the battle is over.  I must have turned
the handle too fast!"

But more than the sardonic jest of Cham, the Captain's reference to
the nearness of a possible action interested the would-be spectator
of a battlefield.  The wiry, sun-bronzed young man in the broken
boots and the dusty brown Norfolk jacket, now pushing the solid-tired
giant-wheel up a steep and lung-testing hill which the bearers of the
needle-gun took in a canter, had seen war-casualties in appalling
numbers, but he had not yet beheld War.

And now sharp bugles and piercing trumpets were clamoring of War all
round one.  The musketry that one could hear at Pont à Mousson
clattered in volleys among the neighboring hills.  The deep booming
of heavy field-batteries persistently answered.  Every now and then
the ear was violently assaulted by the hideous hyena-yapping of the
mitrailleuse.

These breasting hills, these deep-cupped valleys walled and ramparted
with wood-crested hill-ranges, cut up the honest battle into a dozen
skirmishes.  Oh! for an open, campaign and a vantage on some breezy
hill-top whence one might see, as the King was seeing with Moltke and
his Chancellor from the ridge above Flavigny!




XLIII

The ridge above Flavigny seemed farther off and more inaccessible
than the Great Atlas.  One must get off the highroad to some elevated
bit of ground, consult the Doctor's map, and use the Chancellor's
binoculars.  Here was a broad track, green with grass grown over
ancient wheel-ruts, leading off upon the left near the crest of the
hill.

The grass-road led to a stone quarry evidently long abandoned.
Skirting the quarry, P. C. Breagh began to climb the grassy scarp of
the hill.  It grew steeper, and presently he awakened to the
difficulties of mountaineering with a velocipede, and hid away, with
the intention of retrieving it later, his stolen giant-wheel in a
clump of whins.  Alas! its bones, like those of many a sentient
charger, were to rust in rains and blister in suns upon that hillside
of the Meurthe Department for many and many a year.

But not knowing this, P. C. Breagh continued climbing.  The ridgy
backbone of turf-jacketed rock proved a natural buttress rising to a
towering platform sparsely grassed, tufted with thorn and
furze-bushes, stunted pines and dwarfy oak-trees, all mossy of stem
and bending to the southwest.

The afternoon sunshine was mellow rather than hot.  The pure dustless
air was fragrant with hill-thyme and the meadow-sweet.  The
autumn-tinted woods were golden, the hills hathed in clear blue air.
The short herbage clothing the steep was warm, smelling like the
clean hide of some great grass-feeding animal.  But for the restless
bickering of trumpets and bugles, and the hellish noise that men with
guns were making, it would have been sweet to be upon the hillside
alone with God.

There was a great view from the summit of the colossal limestone....
You could see that bone of contention, the road leading to Verdun,
stretching away southwestward, a dusty-white ribbon between its lines
of whitening poplars, over the tops of three thick patches of
rusty-golden woodland, and the bushy uplands above Gravelotte and the
church spire of Vernéville.

Dark blue Prussian columns showed on the grassy slopes traversed by
the road that ran from Ars to Bagneux.  Near the Quarries of
Rezerieulles was a huge French battery served by red-legged
artillerymen, who ran about like ants.  But one could only guess at
the fact that Germany and the Bad Neighbor were locked in the
death-grips over six miles square of battle-ground, the breasting
plumps of trees and towering bush-clad ridges hid so much away.

Ah! but the din was hellish!  The woods vomited fire.  White balloons
that meant shrapnel-shells described arcs against the hot blue sky,
crossing and recrossing between Rezonville and Gravelotte.  When they
fell upon the slippery grass slopes they exploded with fearful
crashes, or became black balls that rolled merrily a while and then
lay quiet.  In the grass near them were shapeless lumps and masses,
red and blue, and dark blue; and things with stiff legs sticking up
grotesquely,--the human and equine _débris_ of the morning's fighting
and the battle of the previous day.  The soft westerly breeze brought
an ugly taint upon it--less loathsome, but more horrible than the
stench coming from the huge crowded camps of French about St. Quentin
and Plappeville and Les Carrières and St. Eloy.

Two great nations at each other's throats and God's image being
shattered everywhere....  Blizzards of Lead and Iron, Steel and Fire
raging over six miles square of ground.  Rivers of blood being poured
out, and yet, in spite of the terrific din of War, the insects and
birds and beasts went about their usual business.  The shrill laugh
of the green woodpecker sounded in the copses, the jackdaws were
gossiping as they darted in and out of the clefts of the gray rock.
Two magpies were feeding a late-hatched fledgling among the dwarfy
oak-scrub.  Rabbits were showing their white scuts on the edges of
the oak-plantations; and the black and gray humble-bees were buzzing
as they rifled the lavender scabious and the blue corn-bottles and
the late white clover-blooms.

Looking northeast toward the richly wooded hill where perches Fort
Queleu, you could see the French flag flying from there, and from St.
Privat, and the great cathedral of Metz sitting in the lap of the
Moselle.  The railway bridge crossing the green, slowly rolling river
above Ars was guarded by Uhlans and Engineers.  A stray outpost with
half a field-battery held the island below the bridge, and the rear
squadrons of a brigade of cavalry,--Blue Dragoons, White Cuirassiers,
Uhlans, and Red Hussars, with two batteries of Horse Artillery, were
traversing the iron roadway, the troopers walking beside the horses
as they delicately picked their way along.  The Advance was almost
out of sight, the midpost squadrons, remounted, were under the bluff
that runs beside the river road from Ars to below Aney, and with the
Staff of the Cuirassier brigade-commander--the dazzling
scarlet-and-gold of his British Dragoon's uniform contrasting
forcibly with the steel cuirasses and white coats, his red-plumed
silver helmet shining like a miniature sun--rode Brotherton, on a
powerful dappled-gray horse, his handsome face animated and eager as
he replied to some remark addressed to him by the Brigadier.

"Certainly, General, but I should think the sword could never be
superseded.  It is, with the bow and spear, the traditional weapon of
war."

"You omit the sling, Colonel!" called out an officer who rode behind
him.  And then the scrap of English talk was swamped in the clink of
steel on steel, and the rhythmical trampling of the squadrons that
followed.

P. C. Breagh sat astride of a hot boulder, got out the Doctor's map
and adjusted his cherished binoculars.  They showed him the battalion
he had marched with halted by the side of the river road.  The bridge
at Pagny showed black with solid columns of infantry, marching eight
abreast; their sun-touched bayonets rippling lines of molten silver,
each helmet-spike a flame of ruddy gold.

The First and Second Armies of United Germany, hitherto compelled to
a strenuous inactivity, were having their innings with a vengeance
now....  Looking Metzwards, one could see that three new lines of
pontoons were thrown across the river below Yaux.  A division of the
dark-blue soldiers, with eight squadrons of cavalry and half a dozen
batteries of mounted artillery, were crossing almost within range of
the guns of Mount St. Quentin and Plappeville.

How thickly the white tents were clustered on the green slopes about
both fortresses, Red Breeches swarming in thousands without and
within the walls.  Were the gunners of the huge bronze Creusots one
had read of asleep, or lazy or indifferent?  The answer came in a
spirt of white vapor from an embrasure of the middle salient of St.
Quentin's long, eight-pointed star.  A white-hot flame leaped, a
towering cloud of smoke soared, the roar of a heavy piece of
artillery followed; and a shell of big caliber soared above Moulins
and burst with a shattering explosion and an uprush of flame.  Some
Artillery-horses on the nearest pontoon reared, causing a momentary
confusion.  Their dismounted drivers quieted them, and the orderly
crossing went on.

_Boom-Boom!_  Crack!  A clatter like old iron and a heavy splashing
and pounding of hoofs.  St. Quentin had got the range.--No! the
shrapnel shell had been fired from a French field-battery placed
behind earthworks above St. Ruffine.  Another shell hit the upper
pontoon and must have smashed it adrift on the landing side.  For
dark-blue men and struggling horses were drifting away in the
direction of Metz, and the green river was tinged with red.  The
wheelers of a gun-team, dragged downward by the weight attached to
them, had gone to the bottom almost without a struggle.  The leaders,
submerged all but their wild heads and splashing fore-hoofs, battled
a while with the current before one of them vanished.  The other,
whose rope-and-chain traces had somehow broken, swam gallantly
down-stream, and finally landed on the farther bank.

Further successful practice on the part of France's artillerists may
have followed.  At this juncture the attention of P. C. Breagh became
diverted by a curious fact.  One of the stone-pines seemed to be
lobbing cones at him.  _Whiff-phutt!_ they were dropping on all
sides.  Or could it? ... A shrill whistling sound close by his ear,
and a simultaneous bristling of the hairs upon his scalp and body,
told him that it could.  The missiles were bullets.

They came, sometimes with a sharp whistle that told of unexpended
energy, at others with the pleasant humming that had at first
attracted him, from the woods that clothed the rising ground
northwest and west of the platform he occupied.

Were they Prussian bullets or French?  At the moment, the question
did not interest him.  He had pocketed his map and crawling on his
belly towards the southern edge of his platform, looked cautiously
over, meditating descent.  Beyond was a sandwich-shaped stretch of
woodland climbing to a ridge; and beyond the ridge a considerable
expanse of bush-dotted common bordered by a stream and speckled with
a few farm-buildings.  Quite a decent-sized town lifted its Norman
church-tower nearly a mile away.

The town must be Gorze.  Withdrawing his eyes from it, they dropped
into a deep ravine or combe running parallel with the western and
southern sides of the giant limestone rock he sprawled on.  Ferns
clothed the deep, hollow sides, and oaks and birches, springing from
the bottom, lifted their bushy heads to the level of his face.
Spying between the branches, he saw that the ravine was full of
garishly colored lights and shadows, and that a steady current of
glittering white metal snaked in and out between the tree-trunks,
setting from west to east.

Bayonets, carried on the shoulders of red-breeched French soldiers,
moving with startling rapidity over the dry leaves at the bottom of
the ravine.  A battalion, at least, of wiry, active-looking
Voltigeurs, a mitrailleuse-battery, each weapon hauled by a team of
three gunners....  Green-coated Chasseurs _à pied_, with cocks'
plumes shading the peaks of their _képis_ followed.  Would a surprise
be intended for the cavalry-brigades that had crossed the
railway-bridge and ridden eastward down the river-road a few minutes
previously?  In that case, what ought one to do?

Even as he asked, the advanced company of Voltigeurs discovered the
Prussian squadrons.  He saw a ripple of excitement pass down the
ranks, and the Voltigeurs hurry forward at the double.  He saw the
mitrailleuse-batteries string out in line, push up the sloping sides
of the ravine, and scatter among the trees of the plantation that
climbed the ridge.  The Chasseurs followed.  Their intention was
obvious.  They were going to enfilade the passing brigades from the
cover of the wood.

Even as the hounds of hell seemed to break loose, and a sheet of pure
yellow-white flame ran from end to end of the ridge where the trees
ended, the foremost brigade of three Hussar regiments came in view,
trotting over a track that traversed the common, became a road, and
plunged between deep woodlands trending west.  His map had told him
that the road led to Rezonville and Gravelotte.

He heard the Prussian trumpets sound through the ear-splitting racket
of the French rifle-fire.  He saw through the thin haze of
powder-smoke that hung above the wood, the massed columns split into
squadrons, the squadrons divide into troops, the troops become
units--scattered over the common, galloping to re-form again upon the
road that led through the woods to Rezonville.

They were two of the brigades forming Rheinbaben's Fifth Division,
under Von Barby and Von Bredow, pushing forward to join General von
Redern in the neighborhood of Mac La Tour.  Their mobility saved them
from decimation on a grand scale, but they left dead horses and men
and officers dead and wounded.  Their retreat was covered by one of
their batteries of Horse Artillery, and two squadrons of a Uhlan
regiment.

In the distance a riderless gray charger galloped wildly over the
common, and a prone figure in a brilliant scarlet coat lay motionless
beside the track.  More could not be observed just then, for the
battery of Horse Artillery got into position, while the Uhlans
dismounted and coolly returned with carbine-fire the enfilade from
the chassepots in the wood.

They knelt, and aimed and shot without hurry, and that their shooting
was effective was demonstrated to the noncombatant onlooker, by half
a dozen French Artillerymen and Chasseurs _à pied_ who came
staggering or limping back through the trees, and got down into the
ravine.  One toppled over in the act of negotiating the descent, and
lay sprawling and head downward.  Another, who kept putting a hand to
his streaming cheek, and taking it away to stare at the blood upon
it, was shot again in a vital part, spun around, and collapsed in a
heap.

"_Lee-ee eer!_"

The wailing, stinging screech of a bullet that had shaved
unpleasantly near was accompanied by the whisking of the sun-scorched
straw hat from the head of P. C. Breagh, and an acute pang of deadly
fear.  In the same instant the Prussian field-battery opened fire.
Beyond the trees four puffs of white smoke went up, and four tongues
of bright yellow flame preceded the quadruple crash of the
driving-charges.  Lanes opened through the smoke-filled wood, as
trees split into kindling and match-sticks.  And heaps of green and
scarlet rags mixed with bloody flesh and shattered bones mingled with
the _débris_.  And something that screamed like a devil unchained
hurtled through intervening space, and plumped upon the limestone
platform within a dozen feet of P. C. Breagh.  And he shrieked like a
shot rabbit as it exploded with a splitting crash, and a spurt of
evil yellow fire licked the skin off his ear and cheek.

Dazed and stupefied, he removed himself to the farther and more
sheltered side of the platform.  But the skirmish was over, the
Voltigeurs and the Chasseurs _à pied_, with what remained of the
mitrailleuse-battery, had not waited for the Uhlans to charge, but
were in pell-mell retreat along the ravine.  He heard a French voice
cry savagely:

"We are cut off!  These woods are full of Prussians!"

And in the same instant, through the lanes that had been hacked
through the trees, P. C. Breagh saw the Prussian artillery limber up
and ride off with what remained of the Uhlan squadrons.  They were
wanted badly at the front, and the infantry-battalions with which P.
C. Breagh had marched from Pont à Mousson, and the Division coming up
from Pagny, striking into the Ars road, had crossed the upper end of
the ravine.  The woods were indeed full of them.  And they also were
wanted at the front and had no time to spare.

As blue uniforms and crimson faces topped by gilt-spiked helmets came
crowding through the trees, the human river, flowing along the bottom
of the defile, rose in a wave and splashed back upon itself.  A
red-haired young officer of Voltigeurs, drawing his sword, used his
voice and the flat of the weapon to restore order; and succeeded so
far that his company formed in straggling lines and began to send in
volleys with the courage of despair.  The gunners of the mitrailleuse
that was not smashed by the German shell-fire could not use the piece
effectively at the bottom of the death-trap.  They were shot down in
the attempt.

It was cool, scientific slaughter--merciless carnage.  Before it
began, a bugle cautioned attention.  A flat-capped field-officer
pushed his horse to the front and cried in stentorian tones:

"Aimed fire!"

The men of the chassepot made a gallant stand, but the odds were
heavy, and the men of the needle-gun did not waste a cartridge.  They
loaded and aimed, fired and reloaded with machine-like precision.
When the ravine was piled with bloody corpses the bugles sounded
"Cease fire!"  Then the Prussian field-officer spurred to the edge of
the red ditch and shouted, looking down:

"Does anyone here ask quarter?"

There was a laugh.  But something raised itself from a heap of
bullet-pierced bodies.  A rattling voice cried:

"No, dog of a Prussian!"

A revolver cracked, and the speaker, a Voltigeur, was silent.  His
voice had sounded like that of an old man, but he wore the epaulettes
of a lieutenant and had carroty-red hair.  At this juncture, being
overtaken by grievous retching and vomiting, P. C. Breagh's
observations ceased.

He sat up presently and wiped his dripping neck and mopped his
forehead.  It seemed to him that he had seen the whole French Army
exterminated, and yet he had witnessed but a skirmish ending in a
battue.  He shook his wits into some order, and controlled the
shuddering that took him in the pit of the stomach, when he
remembered that in common decency he must go to Brotherton.

The descent from the rock-platform was nothing more than a risky
scramble.  There were plenty of pine and furze roots and jutting
stones for holding to and clefts into which to thrust one's toes.
But the crossing of that ravine cumbered with bloody corpses was not
effected without revolt of body and soul.  He slipped once and fell,
and struggled up all horribly besmeared and sick and shaking.  For
the teeth of a head from which the face had been shot away had
snapped close by his ear.  Then came the negotiation of the bit of
woodland.  Here were more Voltigeurs and Chasseurs _à pied_ dead and
horribly mutilated, and the wreck of a mitrailleuse, with two of its
gunners.  Some of these poor wounded creatures were living, and
moaned for water.

"My God!--my God! how I suffer!" one feeble voice kept crying.

Help was coming, for from the direction of the town some carts were
being driven, one by a stout priest in cassock and broad-brimmed hat,
others by men with Red Cross armlets.  Black-habited, white-capped
Sisters of Mercy were in these vehicles, with baskets, and pitchers,
and pails.

Seven dead Hussars showing hideously the effect of
mitrailleuse-fire,--a troop-horse or two, and a White Cuirassier shot
through the body and swearing horribly in Low German, were the fruits
of the French enfilade.  The fine gray charger had ceased careering;
it grazed peaceably on the short herbage by the track that led over
the common.  But Chris Brotherton would never sit in saddle again.

P. C. Breagh turned him gently over and opened the gold-laced scarlet
tunic.  There was no blood upon it, only clean dust, nor was the dead
man bruised or cut, having fallen where it was grassy.  Upon the
broad breast, under the white cambric shirt, was an oval miniature,
pearl-set, of a pretty woman.  The handsome mouth of the wearer
smiled under the drooping fair mustache, and his blue eyes stared
glassily.  A bluish hole in the right temple and a bloody clot amid
the hair upon the left side showed where the chassepot bullet had
traversed the brain.

He had been high-handed, arrogant, and domineering, yet the Doctor
and the horsey Towers had seemed to love him.  No doubt that woman in
the miniature had held Chris Brotherton dear....  P. C. Breagh would
have left her fair face lying on the yet warm breast of her lover,
but something he saw going on among the casualties upon the edge of
the wood caused him to change his mind.

That gaunt-eyed, greedy-fingered creature in the peasant's blouse and
Red Cross brassard, who glided from body to body, rifling pockets,
should not plunder the Doctor's friend.  With this determination,
Carolan took away the portrait, a packet of letters, and Brotherton's
watch and purse and pocketbook, then went forward to meet the
Sisters, just descending from the foremost of the string of peasants'
carts; and began:

"My Sister..."

The nun addressed turned a pleasant face upon him, and cried, with a
sympathetic clasping of her small, work-roughened hands:

"There is blood on Monsieur! ... He has been wounded."

P. C. Breagh explained with economy of words how and where he had
been watching the fighting, and whence came the ugly stains upon his
clothes.  The nun glanced toward the wood, paled and shuddered, and
said, making the sign of the Cross upon her starched, cape-like
_guimpe_:

"But all cannot be dead who lie bleeding in that _ravin_--the hollow
where our poor school-children gather primroses in Spring?"

"I think they must be.  The massacre was carried out deliberately.
Aimed fire--and there is not a movement, not a groan...."

P. C. Breagh shuddered, remembering the crossing of the red ditch.
The nun said with energy, as other black habits and white guimpes
came crowding round her:

"We must make sure....  Each of those bodies must be lifted and
examined.  Life often lingers, sir, when it seems to have fled.  We
learned that in the Crimea, when we worked in the base-hospitals of
Kamiesch.  What of these things?"  P. C. Breagh was holding out the
portrait, purse, pocketbook, and letters.  "You wish our Reverend
Mother to take charge of them?  They belonged to that dead officer
yonder, in the scarlet uniform?  He was English, you tell me--and
you, too, are of England?  Very well!  It shall be as you wish,
Monsieur--I am free to decide, as I am the Superior of our community.
But I will not receive the valuables at your hands until you have
helped us to clear that terrible ravine.  We have only our good
priest with a few peasants and one surgeon, and some charitable
ladies and gentlemen of the Association of the Red Cross.  Everyone
else is panic-stricken--they have barricaded themselves within their
shops and houses, and taken refuge in the cellars....  The explosions
of cannon have been so terrible--they are becoming yet more alarming,
and when the fighting came quite close....  Our people are not brave,
you think!--Still, everyone cannot be courageous....  But, Monsieur,
who watches men being killed by guns to gain experience--we may look
to Monsieur for help?"

The clear woman-eyes went to the sun-browned, freckled face of the
young man in the travel-worn, dusty, blood-stained clothing, and
realized that a struggle was going on within him.  She said:

"If Monsieur is of necessity compelled to go and leave us, I will
take charge of the dead English officer's property for Monsieur.  But
a great blessing is for those who succor the wounded.  Our Lord has
always promised this!"

No one listened to the little colloquy; some of the Sisters were
already stooping beside the prone bodies, two of them were helping
the vocal Cuirassier into a cart....

With a great longing P. C. Breagh had longed to make the ridge south
of Flavigny, and see with his own eyes how the Man of Iron comported
himself in the clash of war.  And to stay behind and forego the
possibility cost him poignant anguish, but one could not leave the
Superior and the Sisters to dabble unaided in that ghastly ravine.

"I will stay, Reverend Mother," he said, with a bow that might have
been more clumsy.  Next moment Brotherton's property had vanished
into a huge pocket hidden somewhere in the black habit.  The nun
clapped her hands, crying to the peasants:

"Thanks! thanks!  Come, Antoine, Pichegru, Eloi, Bénoit!  Dubois!  To
the wood, my friends! and the hollow, where are many sufferers!  I
place you under the orders of this English Monsieur."




XLIV

Upon that battlefield of Gravelotte, France, driven to bay, fought
like a royal tigress.  How many times the dark blue Divisions were
thrown back in their assault upon positions zoned with
death-bellowing cannon and death-barking mitrailleuses, History
relates.  So murderous was the fire of her chassepotiers from their
densely manned rifle-pits that you could trace Moltke's plans of
assault in mounds of dead Uhlan cavalry and long regular swathes of
motionless blue objects that had been Schmidt, Schultz, and Kunz....

Yet if the Warlock had said within himself, "_This shall be above all
a battle of cavalry_," it would seem as though the determination had
been formed upon the other side.

For this day that saw the death-charge of Von Bredow's brigade upon
the Gorze Road--Uhlans, White Cuirassiers, and Dragoons of the Guard
hurled in a solid column of shining steel against French
field-batteries and battalions of riflemen--also saw the cavalry of
Frossard, of Ladmirault, and Canrobert ride down whole squares of
German infantry, who rose again and poured in volleys from their
needle-guns, to be beaten down by the storms of leaden hail ground
out by the mitrailleuse.

A glowing, coppery sun looked down on those six square miles of
fiercely contested ground.  Over its whole expanse there was not one
patch as big as a National School playground without its _débris_ of
arms and accouterments, its ghastly or ludicrous tokens of war.

In an intermittent lull of the racket you could hear the dry earth,
that had been pounded bare of verdure, sucking moisture as though
after heavy rain.  Only the rain was red.  The faint, sour smell of
it came to the nostrils mingled with the smell of burnt gunpowder,
human and equine exhalations, and the acrid stifle of burning wood.

For Flavigny was yet smouldering, the farm-buildings at Gorze were
burning, Malmaison was a furnace; houses and barns at Verneville were
wrapped in clouds of black smoke shot with lurid flame.

Exhausted battalions, sick and stupefied with slaughter, were lying
down among the dead and the wounded to snatch a wink of sleep.
Others opened their haversacks to snatch a hasty mouthful, or drained
their canteens of the last drop.  Surgeons were going up and down
among them, patching up flesh-cuts with lint and diachylon,
temporarily plugging bullet-wounds of the minor order.  "There!" they
would say to the Schmidt, Kunz, or Schultz so treated; "now you are
fit for fighting again!"

Perhaps you can see the Man of Iron in his white Cuirassier cap,
black undress frock with the pewter buttons, and great steel-spurred
jack-boots, standing, grim-jawed and inscrutable, behind his King's
camp-chair.  Through the stress and storm of two long days of hot
fighting, that patch of high ground south of Flavigny had been the
point to which orderlies and aides-de-camp furiously galloped from
every point of the compass, and from which they galloped back in even
more desperate haste.

In the rear of the camp-chair, not so close to it as to draw fire,
were the King's personal military staff, a bevy of Princes, and the
representative of the British War Office, Colonel ----.  Several
Councillors and Secretaries of the Chancellor's traveling Foreign
Office stood about, stout, gray-haired, important-looking persons in
semi-military uniform.  The carriages that had conveyed them waited
at Tronville.  The King's charger and those of the other great
personages were in the care of orderlies.  The Escort waited by their
horses in the background.

Moltke stood apart, taciturn and inscrutable, nursing his thin elbow
and cupping his long chin.  Roon, who contrary to his custom was not
wearing his helmet, gloomily champed his cap-strap, unable to
disguise his anguish of anxiety.  He would have given a year of life
to say:

"Old man, so cool in the midst of this hellish slaughter, can it be
that you do not know how things really are going?  Since two of the
clock the French have had the best of it!  The chassepot you termed a
'magnificent weapon' has justified your eulogism.  The mitrailleuse
we despised, not comprehending its terrible capabilities, has
revealed them to our undoing.  The Army of United Germany bleeds at
every pore!"

He tore his mustache, the dye upon which had not been renewed
recently.  His heart swelled with the flood of pent-up speech.

"The Commander-in-Chief's dispatches to the Queen have been cheered
in Berlin.  Throughout Germany they are hailed with joy....  '_France
now fights with her back to the Rhine_,' the people say.  '_Our Army
stands arrayed between Bazaine and Paris!_'  Is it possible they do
not realize that the situation is critical?  Have they no suspicion
that the tables might be turned?"

He wrung his knotted hands together in torment, and the sweat started
in gouts upon his livid skin.

"Before us the Army of Bazaine--behind us at Châlons the Army of
MacMahon.  Were the Duke of Magenta with his recuperated Divisions to
advance energetically and swiftly to the relief of his brother
Marshal--could the Crown Prince hold him back?  And if he could not,
what were our chance worth?..."

The sentence had escaped Roon without his knowledge.  Moltke's
wrinkled visage turned his way.  The scarlet-rimmed eyes glittered on
him a moment.  Roon leaped as the dry voice said:

"Not so much as a pinch of snuff!"

The War Minister stammered:

"Pardon, Your Excellency!  You spoke to me?..."

Moltke answered quietly:

"I asked if you could spare me a pinch of snuff.  My box is empty."
He opened the little silver receptacle and turned it upside down,
tapping it on his finger nail: "Neither have I a single cigar!"

Roon had forgotten his cigar-case in quarters.  He fumbled for his
snuff-box, thought it must be in his cloak.  A resonant voice said
from behind the King's camp-chair: "Will Your Excellency take one of
these?"

"Why not? why not?  If they are not too strong for me...."  The
Warlock smiled, showing his toothless gums.  The Chancellor said,
opening and offering the plain green leather case with the coroneted
B stamped in gilding on it:

"It may be they are stronger than you are accustomed to smoke?"

Moltke's keen, swift glance met the heavy blue stare of the
Chancellor.  He returned:

"I will answer Your Excellency when I have tested them."

The case held three Havanas of varying merit.  Two were good, one
super-excellent.  The withered hand hovered, paused above them, made
selection, while the sharp, glittering glance seemed to say: "So! ...
You are trying again the test you put me to at Königgratz!  See!  I
am cool enough to choose the better creed!"  While Bismarck returned
the case to his breeches-pocket, mentally commenting:

"Excellent.  He has chosen the best one.  He is not flustered--he has
yet a trump to play!"

Believed, he returned to his post behind the King's camp-chair, a
rugged, powerful figure, with the face of a thoroughbred mastiff,
unwearyingly keeping guard lest meaner influences should undermine
his power and topple his unfinished life-work down.

Watching the battle through these noonday hours, he had, being a
practical soldier as well as a consummate statesman, known some
moments of horrible foreboding.  Now his courage revived.  The work
would be completed.  The well-shaped, sun-browned hand lightly
resting on the chair-back would hold all Germany within its iron grip.

The thrill of conscious power transmitted itself to the King, it may
be, for he moved impatiently in his seat.  Sometimes he must have
chafed, the white-haired Hohenzollern chieftain, knowing himself a
puppet in the hands of his powerful Minister.

"How they fight!  How they fight!  _Ach Gott!_" he muttered.
"Wouldst thou have credited, Otto, that such fire was left in France?"

And the helmeted head of the old chieftain shook with an
uncontrollable nervous spasm.  Over it came the scoffing retort:

"It is the fire of fever, the fire of phosphorescence.  It will leave
them weak and debilitated--it will glimmer out and go black.  And yet
Bazaine, contemptible as a strategist, has his moments of
inspiration.  The thrust of the skilled fencer will sometimes puzzle
the master of swordsmanship....  Frossard and Canrobert are devout
Catholics, and no doubt believe in guardian-spirits.  They have had a
hint, it may be, from some celestial Field Marshal; St. Louis,
possibly, or the Chevalier de Bayard."

The King murmured, unheeding the jest, his eyes glued to the
field-glasses that jerked in his shaking hands:

"Even a victory could not bring my soldiers of the Guard to life
again.  And there!  Dost thou see?..."

The Minister turned his own binoculars in the indicated quarter.
What remained of a Division of the Prussian 10th Corps, with a
brigade of cavalry, Uhlans and Dragoons, was locked in the death-grip
with a Cavalry Division of Bazaine's own corps, the Third, on the
plain between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.  And
even the Chancellor's iron hand trembled as with ague, and his
breathing harshened perceptibly as he carefully focused the glasses
on the fight.  He said after a moment:

"Those three regiments of cavalry on brown horses with green,
silver-laced dolmans and red-bagged talpacks are Chasseurs of the
Imperial Guard.  Fine fellows!  They have a man to lead them, it
would seem, in that little Colonel with the big paunch."

The Brigadier of the Chasseurs had been killed by a shell, and upon
Paunchy had devolved the leadership.  Twice he had led the green
dolmans in shattering charges, under the stress of which the dark
blue islands of infantry had hollowed and caved in.  Twice he had
fought his way out at the head of his shrunken and mutilated
squadrons.  Now, sweeping round, the Dragoons and Uhlans had attacked
the Chasseurs furiously in the rear.

All that could be seen, even through the binoculars, was a shifting
kaleidoscopic jumble of gay uniforms.  Men's heads and arms rising
and falling, flashing swords, flickering lance-pennons, and the
crests and hindquarters of plunging beasts....  Hence Kraus, Klaus,
and Klein of the blue infantry could not fire into the _mêlée_ for
fear of shooting their countrymen.  Red Breeches hesitated to use his
chassepot on the same count.

About a bushy knoll to the left of the struggle, the German cavalry
circled like swallows, greedily assailing a swarm of green and red
dragon-flies.  The chasseurs' cartridge-boxes being empty, they used
their long sabers as they had used their carbines, coolly and
effectively; and Paunchy, lifted above the press by the little knoll
referred to, encouraged them with looks and gestures and words.

"Courage, my children! ... Follow me! ... Bravo! ... One moment's
breathing-space, and at them again!"

He was only a green and scarlet speck in the midst of an aggregation
of other specks on the vast battlefield, yet the King and the
Minister watched him with fixed regard.

"_Grosser Gott_!  How that man fights!" the King muttered at one
point in the conflict, and the rejoinder came from overhead:

"He is gallant, certainly, but a bit of an actor.  Would not one say
that flourish was meant for the ladies in the orchestra-stalls?"

"Because he has kissed a medal or a relic?" the King muttered,
tugging at his white whisker.  "Doubtless he is Catholic....  We
ourselves have many brave soldiers of the Roman faith!"


For as his squadrons ever thinned and dwindled, every instant paying
toll to the great swords of the Prussian Dragoons and the
blood-thirsty Uhlan lances, they had seen the little Brigadier take
from the breast of his green dolman something white and press his
bearded lips to it, and thrust it back again, and sign himself with
the Cross.

"_Hurrah Preussen!  Immer vorwärts!_" yelled the Uhlans, as their
dripping lance-points flickered in and out between the red-stained
sword-blades, and the bodies of dead Chasseurs and dead horses rose
in a mound about the knoll where stood the little Brigadier.

Paunchy possessed a great voice.  His "_Chargez!_" had reached the
ears of the King and his Chancellor through all the pandemonium of
battle.  When his Staff trumpeter's instrument, bullet-pierced, gave
forth no sound but a strangled screeching, the little Colonel's
thundering "_Feu!_" needed no trumpet to make the order plain.  Now,
his "_Vive la France!  Vive l'Empereur!_" boomed out like the roar of
a dying lion.  His melting squadrons gave back the rallying-cry.

But they were lost.  Prisoned within the ring of piercing steel that
tirelessly revolved about them, they could kill, but they could not
break through the barrier.  Fresh squadrons rushed with hoarse shouts
to the aid of the German cavalry.  The Chasseurs were hopelessly
outnumbered, and must inevitably be crushed.

The subaltern who bore the Imperial standard got a lance-thrust in
the shoulder.  At the same moment, his horse was shot dead.  As the
beast reared in the death-throe and went down under the plunging
hoofs of the maddened horses round him, the Colonel leaned from his
saddle, seized the hand that gripped the staff of the standard, drew
the fainting officer upward, and laid him across his own saddle-bow.
Then, as his gallant horse braced itself to bear the double burden,
the rider lifted high the glistening folds of the tricolor topped by
the golden Imperial eagle, and as the Uhlans charged the knoll he
shouted again in terrible tones the slogan of the dying Empire:

"_Vive la France!  Vive l'Empereur!_"


War has many of these sublime moments mingled with her squalid
hideousness.  Upon this day many a soldier, French and German, died
as finely as the father of Juliette.  You are to see him--bareheaded,
for the fur talpack with the plume of green and scarlet had been
sheared from his head by a glancing sword-cut--lifting a war-flushed
forehead to the sky all sunset-red.  Then a mortal lance-thrust
reached him over the body that lay across his horse's withers, and he
reeled upon his saddle, and fell backward, partly swathed in the Flag
for which so many heroes have died.

Through the tricolored folds yet other Uhlan lance-points reached
him.  Did any thought of his daughter pass through the brain of the
dying soldier between the sharp pangs of the probing steel?

"_My child ... safe ... neutral territory....  Charles ... honest man
... protect my girl from Adelaide!  Now ... death!  Ah!--agony!
Save, Jesu! ... Mary, help!_"

A few of his gallant Chasseurs surrendered.  But these were only a
handful.  Nearly the whole strength of his brigade of three regiments
lay dead upon that patch of common that was cumbered with their
corpses and those of their enemies.




XLV

Bismarck said, lowering his binoculars:

"Lucky that war is so confoundedly expensive.  Otherwise, one might
get too fond of it!"

The King groaned:

"My Dragoons of the Guard!--my Uhlans, slaughtered in regiments!  My
infantry shattered--decimated--annihilated in Divisions.  The bravest
blood of France--poured out upon French soil like water....  Great
God!--how shall I defend this carnage to the Queen?..."

The voice behind him said, ironically:

"My wife writes me ten pages every three days, urging upon me in
Biblical language the necessity for complete extermination of
everything French!  Believe me, Sire, he who is guided by the advice
of a woman follows, not a Jack, but a Jinny o' Lantern, that will
inevitably lead him into a bog!"

The King winced under the gibe, yet he said, striking his clenched
hand passionately upon his knee:

"And this shadow that we follow southward, this vision, of a Crown
Imperial!  What is it but an _ignis fatuus_ that has plunged us to
the neck in the morass of War?  If the whole Army of United Germany
sink down in the death-sleep, for what have we offered up the
sacrifice?"

The answer came, prompt and authoritative:

"Your Majesty may leave that question to be answered by the sons of
these men who lie dead about us, and the sons they shall in their
time beget.  If your Majesty's whole army must be sacrificed to
insure German Unity, let it be so, in the name of Heaven!"

The King tugged again at his white side-whisker and muttered
something about "sinful ambition."  The hand that had wrenched the
curb now offered sugar.  The voice said, mellowed and softened to
persuasive tenderness:

"I have served a great King.  I aim to serve a great Emperor.  If my
ambition be sinful, it is at least not base!"

"Ah, Otto!"  The King rose, and his hard, yellowish-hazel eyes were
full of tears as they met the Minister's.  "You have no argument so
strong as your disinterestedness.  For even your bitterest enemies
have never questioned that!"

Something took place in the brain behind the great domed forehead
hidden by the Cuirassier cap, the fierce, almost challenging stare
sank beneath the old man's tearful look of love.  The Man of Iron was
asking himself: "Am I, then, so disinterested? ... If I am, why is it
that these words have power to gall me so?  Can it be that I have my
price as well as others?  I think myself repaid in Power for what
other Ministers will only sell for gold."

The momentary embarrassment passed.  He said, pointing to one of
those long blue mounds of dead infantry:

"And who could see our soldiers advance under the fire of these
French chassepots and the terrible mitrailleuses, and doubt that they
have understood the greatness of the issue at stake.  Excuse me a
moment, Sire! ... What is it, Götzow?"

The _aide-de-camp_, in the full uniform of the Chancellor's own
regiment of Cuirassiers, was white as his own coat.  He gulped out:

"Excellency, I am charged by His Highness, Prince Augustus of
Württemberg, Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Guard Corps..."

The Chancellor's prominent blue eyes lightened so fiercely upon the
speaker that he began to stammer and boggle in his speech:

"Terrible intelligence ... only just received by His Highness....
Yesterday Your Excellency's sons, Count Herbert and Count William,
were in the general cavalry charge which took place at Mars la
Tour..."

The great soldierly figure standing with the huge spurred boots
apart, the hands leaning on the long steel-hilted sword, might have
been cast in iron or carved in granite for all the emotion conveyed
by look or gesture.  The voice said stridently and harshly:

"The First Dragoons of the Guard were not involved in the struggle.
Only the brigades of Von Barby, the 4th Westphalian Cuirassiers, the
10th Hussars, and the 16th Dragoons."

The ghastly aide faltered, perspiring freely:

"At the moment of General von Barby's charge, it has been
unfortunately ascertained, a squadron of Prussian Guard Dragoons of
the First Regiment--returning from a patrol, dashed into the
_mêlée_..."

The Chancellor drew a sharp breath, but stirred not a finger.  His
fierce eyes, staring from dark pits that had suddenly been dug round
them, paralyzed the wretched bearer of the tragic intelligence.  He
asked in a tone that appalled by its tranquillity:

"Have both my sons been killed?"

The _aide-de-camp_ got out that it was feared so.  He was thanked and
charged with a polite message to the Prince.  As he saluted and
retired, lightened of his tidings of anguish, the Minister focused
his binoculars with a steady hand upon that point toward the
northward where the dark bulk of the fortress of St. Privat loomed on
a hill-top covered with masses of troops and traversed by a straight
white, poplar-bordered road, regularly trenched for musketry.  He
said in the same tone of composure, though his set face and the hand
that held the glasses were wet as though with rain:

"St. Privat still resists.  General Pape, with the Guard's cavalry
and the Saxons, will find their work cut out for them in driving
those French battalions out of the village below the hill."

He lowered and wiped the glasses with his handkerchief.  The King
said entreatingly, laying a hand upon his arm:

"Go, go!  Find out the truth about your sons, Bismarck....  Leave not
a stone unturned, in God's name!"

Even as the King spoke, German drums and trumpets sounded the charge;
and there was a sudden shifting of masses of troops in the direction
of St. Hubert.  Then as a wave of dark blue men began to roll out
from the deep woods that flanked the village of Gravelotte, so fierce
a storm of cannon and mitrailleuse and chassepot began to beat about
their heads that the unseasoned horses of the Princes of the suite
kicked and plunged and the Minister said:

"It would be wise did your Majesty remove out of this neighborhood.
These bon-bons thrown by Frossard's artillery are coming much too
near."

"I will ride back--I will move out of the way," said the old man in
great agitation.  "But you, Bismarck!--you must go and see about your
sons!"

He answered, and his great bloodshot eyes and sagging jowl were more
than ever those of a mastiff:

"When I have seen your Majesty in a place of safety I will ask your
permission to do so."

An orderly from Steinmetz, who now had his field headquarters at St.
Hubert, arrived with an urgent entreaty that the King would at once
retire.

The horses were brought.  King William and Von Roon mounted.  The
Chancellor's mare had been sent to water; his orderly appeared with
her as the King's party rode on.  With a hasty word of reproof the
Minister swung his great figure into the saddle, but the brawn and
bone of his beast had not carried him clear of the threatened spot
before a retreating wave of German foot and horsemen swept over it,
followed by the thundering gallop of a retreating battery.

It was a _sauve-qui peut_, caused by the smashing fire from the
French shrapnel and mitrailleuse batteries, and the practice of the
French riflemen entrenched at the Moscow Farm.  A general officer
rode through the rout, laying about him with the flat of his drawn
sword and swearing horribly, to judge by his bloodshot eyes, and
purple countenance.

"Hares!  _Gottverdammt!_ hares!" he gasped breathlessly, finding
himself face to face with a gigantic officer of Cuirassiers.  "A
thousand pardons, Excellency.  I did not at once recognize you.
Surely you will follow his Majesty to the rear?"

"Willingly," said the Chancellor, as a brace of French shells
exploded, digging pits in the sandy ground over which the Headquarter
Staff had passed.  "Only, as shell does not fall twice in the same
place, I am waiting to make sure."  And, with a knee-touch, he put
the brown mare into her stride.

There was a backward surge of disorganized infantry as the huge beast
lifted herself over the yawning craters.  But she passed through the
press by the bore and thrust of her great shoulders, and the beast
and the big man she carried were swallowed up in the roaring dusk.

Moltke, the bald-headed war-eagle, remained brooding his coign of
observation upon the verge of the ridge south of Flavigny, his
feathers drooping, his shoulders hunched, his sharp, hooked beak
inclined toward his breast; his red eyes, burning with the
battle-lust, staring fixedly from under the wide, hairless brows.


The sun sank in clouds of smoky gold and crimson over that country of
copses, ravines, ruddy brown farmhouses, and white villages.  Evening
came down and dipped her wings in billows of salt-tasting gunpowder
smoke, rose-tinged above and beneath by the reflection from the red
sky and the red earth.  The green Moselle was tinged with blood.
Little rivers ran blood, streams and springs became blood.  Wells
were filled with blood, as in old time under the rod of the Lawgiver
of Israel, and still the battle raged over hill and valley, common
and highroad.

Flavigny village still smouldered, Malmaison was burning, houses and
barns at Verneville were wrapped in roaring flames.  Yet the gunners
of the French batteries at Moscow, Point du Jour, La Folie, and the
Quarries of Amanvilliers and Rezerieulles, continued to make practice
of the deadliest; and still French cavalry charged the Teuton's
dwindling infantry-squares.

Had not a comparatively fresh and vigorous Prussian Army Corps
dropped in at the crucial moment success had hardly crowned the arms
of United Germany.  They had been marching every day since they
quitted the Saar, those solid-thewed Pomeranians of the 2d Corps, but
at Puxieux they had cooked and eaten, and now appeared like giants
refreshed.

Not only Steinmetz rode at their head, with their commander Von
Fransecky, but the Warlock in person directed their attack.
Battalions that had retired in disorder reformed and rushed back to
meet afresh the brunt of battle.  Wherever the red eye glittered and
the withered finger pointed, fresh swarms of fierce assailants were
hurled against the dwindling hosts of France.

Down came the dark, and now St. Privat was burning; the village under
the lee of the fort was burning--sending up great columns of livid
smoke shot with licking tongues of flame.  The day was over.  But
crackling lines of fire outlined the position of the rifle-trenches;
the mitrailleuse batteries still spat death unwearyingly, as what
remained of Bazaine's Army retired in comparative safety to the
Fortress of St. Quentin under cover of that fiery screen.

There the shattered brigades and mutilated divisions clung like
swarming wasps "with plenty of sting in them yet," said Moltke, "and
the hive"--meaning the huge Fortress of Metz--"handy in their rear.
But, on the whole," he added, "I am excellently well satisfied.  My
calculations have worked out correctly.  Those Pomeranians of the
Second Corps arrived just in time!"

And the veteran galloped joyously as a young trooper of twenty-five
to cheer his King with the good news.


And can you see that other man, to whom Emperors and Kings and
Ministers referred when they mentioned Prussia, who outwitted nations
in policy and made wars at will, spurring the great brown mare wildly
through the weltering darkness, with salt drops of mortal anguish
coursing down his granite cheeks?

"Bazaine's right has been turned by the Saxons, the Guards have
smashed his center, and the Pomeranians of the Second Corps have
taken St. Privat and forced him to retreat, leaving Germany master of
the field.  Success has crowned beyond hope the arms of the
Fatherland, but where are the sons who called me father? ... Is this
Thy judgment upon one through whom so many fathers are sonless, O my
offended God?"

Perhaps he groaned forth such words as these, as he bucketed the
great brown mare through the perilous darkness, over roads bestrewn
with helmets, swords, and cuirasses, knapsacks, talpacks,
forage-caps, and schakos, needle-guns, and chassepots, and camp
kettles, as well as the human _débris_ of War.  The flare of a
lantern tied to and swinging from one of the great steel stirrups
threw a treacherous and fitful light upon his road.

Follow him as he ranged from camp to camp, questioning,
investigating....  It was black night and raining heavily when a
gleam of hope dawned upon the man.

The cavalry piquet-officer who had given the clue beheld the great
brute and her huge rider vanish in a cloud of their own steam.  A
furious clatter of hoofs came back out of the welter ing darkness, as
the flaring lantern, gyrating like some captive fiend at the end of
its tether, dwindled to a dancing will-o'-the-wisp and vanished, the
officer exclaimed:

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ he must have a neck like other men.  Yet he
rides as though it were forged of tempered steel!"

"Who rides? ... What was that?" asked a brother officer, waking from
a doze of exhaustion beside the hissing logs of the rain-beaten
watch-fire.  He got reply:

"Only the Pomeranian bear ranging in search of his lost cubs."  He
added: "I was able to tell him that he would find the eldest of them
at the field-hospital of Mariaville, upon which he galloped away like
mad."

"The field-hospital of Mariaville" proved to be a farmhouse on a
hill-top near the battlefield of Mars la Tour.  Candles stuck in the
necks of empty wine-bottles revealed, through the open, unblinded
windows, the figure of the surgeon in charge and those of his
orderly-assistants passing to and fro.

"Have you a Bismarck here?"

The stentorian shout from the yard made wounded men turn upon their
improvised pillows, and brought the head and shoulders of the bibbed
and shirt-sleeved surgeon thrusting out of a window on the first
floor.  A colloquy ensued between the unseen and the medical officer.
Presently the arbitrary voice interrupted:

"What do you call not seriously wounded, man?  Describe the casualty
clearly, without professional Latin, or too many crackjaw words."

The dressers winked to each other behind the back of the surgeon.  He
said, supporting himself with one hand against the crazy window-frame
as he thrust his head and shoulders forth into the dripping darkness
and gesticulated with a hand that held a probe:

"Excellency, your elder son has received three bullets.  One lodged
in the breast of his tunic, another hit his watch, and the third is
at present in the upper part of his thigh.  I was about to place the
patient under chloroform when Your Excellency's call summoned me from
his side."

The voice said, with a clang of anger in it:

"You should not have left him had it been the King who called.  Go
back to him instantly.  I am coming up."

And he came striding in his great boots up the crazy one-flight
stair.  Ghastly faces of wounded soldiers turned upon their pillows
of straw as that gigantic figure filled up the doorway.  His shadow,
thrown by the flaring tallow-candle flames, loomed portentously on
the whitewashed walls.  He wore no cloak or overcoat and dripped as
though he had swum, not ridden, through water to his finding; the
peak of his field-cap discharged quite a little deluge upon his son's
white face as he stooped over the stretcher where the young man lay
and touched his hand, and kissed him on the cheek.

"Never mind.  Clean water does no hurt," he said, for he had drawn
out his handkerchief to wipe the splash away, and finding it soiled
with dust and powder-grime had returned it to his pocket.

The surgeon returned:

"I wish we had clean water--it would be above price.  But all the
springs are fouled with blood, and there are dead French in the
courtyard-well."

"They must be got out and the well cleansed, if possible," said the
Chancellor.  "Meanwhile, a temporary supply must be found....  What
nourishment have you, fit for wounded men?"

The surgeon responded, busy with a cotton-wool chloroform pad:

"Nothing, Excellency, except wine and a little Extract of Liebig."

The Chancellor said harshly:

"Yet this appears to be a farm-house, and I heard the clucking of
fowls down below!"

The surgeon, who was a bullet-headed, obstinate East Prussian, and
did not relish this sort of hectoring, returned, thrusting out a
stubbly under-jaw:

"Excellency, there are certainly fowls in the farmyard.  But they are
not mine, nor have I money to buy.  They belong to the unhappy wretch
who owns this place, and has lost everything else."

And he gave back the stare of the fierce eyes that raked him.  The
Minister began to lisp, an ominous sign:

"Ah, indeed! ... May I--may I ask where you--where you gained your
notions of the code of ethics that should prevail in warfare?"

Said the surgeon, fronting him fairly and squarely:

"Excellency, from my father, who was an honest man!"

Straw rustled under heads that slewed to look at the blunt speaker.
There was a long instant's pause.  Then the Chancellor thrust his
hand into his breeches-pocket, pulled out a gold coin, and said,
tendering it to the medical officer:

"Kindly pay this to the object of your pity for twenty fowls at a
mark apiece.  Now I will keep you no longer from your patient.  Good
night to everyone here."

"Good night, Excellency!" came in chorus.

He gave his brusque salute and had already reached the threshold,
when his son, a colossal, black-haired, brown-skinned young trooper,
who lay back upon his stretcher, staring sulkily at the
smoke-blackened rafters, or contemplating the twitching bare toes of
the leg that bore a tourniquet above the plugged and bandaged wound,
started slightly, looked round, and called:

"Father!"

"What is it, my dear fellow?"

His great stride took him back to the prone young giant on the
stretcher.  Count Herbert said, barely removing his eyes from the
ceiling, and speaking in a studiously indifferent tone:

"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to worry.  His
horse was shot under him, but he got hold of another.  I saw him ride
off all right with a wounded comrade behind him.  That's all.
Goodnight!"

The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of the ceiling.
The sire, who had received the news in silence, went out at the door,
stooping under the lintel, his great shoulders rasping the posts on
either side.  They heard his heavy footsteps pass down the crazy
staircase.  A curt sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went
through the kitchen on his way to the door.  Then he was in the yard,
loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern.  An instant, and
three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession, each followed by a
significant cackling and squawking.  The surgeon, now fitting the
cotton-wool pad upon the wire mouthpiece and signing to his assistant
to hand him the chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and
nostrils of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he poured
the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:

"His Excellency is having a little sport.  All the same, without
water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil hen-broth."

Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a hand-cart drawn by
terrified peasants, behind whom rode a trooper of Uhlans,
accelerating their movements with prods of the lance.  A general
officer had sent the barrels for the use of the wounded at
Mariaville.  This service rendered to his son, he rode in search of
his King.




XLVI

He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from Rezonville, having
returned there when the French cavalry of the Left withdrew after
their tremendous charge.  The King was reading dispatches, seated on
a saddle thrown across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire.  The
farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks like a
set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave light enough by
which to read.

Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a deserted hamlet,
of which the very name was uncertain, so sorely had it been mauled
about.  A crust of stale bread and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood
embers furnished his supper.  Water fit for drinking being
unattainable, he tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken
tulip-glass, and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal
ambulance, within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped by
shot and shell.

The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses' chagrin, were
compelled to subsist on fragments of stale sandwiches from their
holster-cases.  The escort bivouacked about the Royal lodging.
Troops, wearied to exhaustion by the two days' continuous fighting,
lay down to sleep in the pouring rain.

The Warlock supped with his personal Staff on ration-biscuit and raw
bacon, and spent the night by a bivouac-fire, among the living and
the dead.  Can you see him sitting on the empty ammunition-box,
buttoned in his dripping waterproof, his scanty meal eaten and his
cigar well alight? ... How contentedly he listens while the bulbul
Henry sings, without notes of accompaniment, his moving ballads.  How
piously he rises, bares his old head, and joins in the robust hymn
sung by his battered but victorious legions, "Now thank we all our
God..."

Or, with the mind's eye, one can follow the Man of Iron as, having
bidden his master good night and left the young Hereditary Grand Duke
of Mecklenburg to keep guard over the royal carriage, he set out, in
company of his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen, a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards
and one of the minor Councillors of the Embassy, in search of a
lodging until break of day.

Sheridan, the famous American General, representing the United States
with the Prussian Headquarters Staff, a short, alert gentleman of
forty-five, with a dark mustache and chin-tuft, and a pronounced
Yankee twang, followed, begging leave to accompany the expedition.
The first cottage approached as likely to afford a night's shelter
was found to be on fire.

"Too hot, though I like warm quarters!" the Chancellor commented.
The next house was found crammed with wounded soldiers, all suffering
from the excellent shell-practice made by the gunners of General
Frossard.  The next house and the next had also been converted into
field-hospitals.  The fourth yielded to the Minister's personal
investigations a vacant attic, with three truckle-beds, provided with
straw palliasses, tolerably clean.

Sheridan and Bismarck-Böhlen threw themselves upon their rude beds
and very soon were soundly sleeping.  For a little while the Man of
Iron stood beside the narrow unglazed window in the attic gable, his
great arms folded on his broad breast, his eyes, bloodshot and
strained with gazing through the fire and smoke of bombardments,
looking out into the wild black welter of the rainy night.

Those torn-up pastures and plow-acres, those devastated cornfields
and woodlands, those burning farms and villages of Lorraine lay in
comparative quiet now....  The hellish roar and crash and tumult of
War had ceased for the time being.  Its ghastly sights were veiled,
for the most part, by merciful darkness, though the innumerable
little sputtering fires kindled by the soldiers threw fitful
illuminations upon grotesque, or strange, or terrible, or
indescribably hideous things....

Hungry, thirsty, weary, and saddle-sore as any trooper of his own
White Cuirassiers was the Man of Iron, having broken his fast at dawn
upon a hunch of bread and bacon-fat, and supped upon a couple of raw
hen's eggs, broken on the pommel of his big steel-hilted sword.  But
as his bloodshot eyes looked upon his handiwork, he was contented.
This huge, vehement, and bloody conflict had established the mastery
of Germany: France was outnumbered, out-generaled, and out-fought.

With frightful loss Moltke had attained his premier object.  The Army
of MacMahon had been driven in rout to Châlons, the retreat of
Bazaine's Army westward had been effectually checked.  The South road
from Metz to Verdun, hitherto lightly held by the advance-patrols of
the Prussian Crown Prince, was now blocked by the whole effective
strength of two out of the three armies of Germany; weakened,
wounded, and bleeding after the two days of desperate fighting, but
still powerful, menacing, and grim.

One desperate effort made at this juncture might have broken through
the barrier of living flesh and steel.  Would it be made, or would
the French Army of the Rhine fall into the snare so cunningly left
open, and retire within the fortified area of Metz?

The gable-attic looked toward the great fortress.  In vain his
glasses swept the formless blackness.  The sparkle of a moonbeam on a
bayonet-point--the green or crimson ray cast by a Staff lantern
moving over the ground, yet screened by the French batteries, might
have cleared the point in doubt.  Save for the sputter of German
watch-fires over the recent field of battle, and the yellow
candle-flare in the windows of half-ruined cottages and outbuildings,
where wounded men lay on straw or the bare earth, no light showed, no
life seemed to be....  He swung the shattered casement wide, and
thrust his head out, gripping the window-sill, intently listening....
No distant roll of iron-shod wheels, no reverberating tread of
countless footsteps; no other sounds, such as might betray the
retreating movement of an armed host, broke the silence of that
tragic night.

Only the sob of the wind and the dripping of the chill rain from the
overflowing roof-gutters, came to him, with the deep ruckling snores
of exhausted Divisions, and the strangling coughs and hollow groans
of mangled and dying men and beasts.

All would be well, he told himself, as he shut up the glasses,
unbuckled his sword-belt, and unhooking his collar stretched himself
in his great boots upon the groaning truckle-bed, his heavy revolver
ready to his hand.  Moltke's great plan would be successful....  The
King would once more prove his Chancellor a true prophet....  The
hand that could build up Prussia from a fourth-rate State into a
world-power, would yet hold the German Empire in its grip of iron,
and through that Empire rule the world!

If He Who created the World had been displeased by Bismarck's
ambitions, things would have gone less smoothly from the outset....
If He Who wrought Man in His Image had been moved to wrath by all
this bloodshed, He would have shown it by letting something happen to
the boys....

But Bill was safe, while Herbert was only slightly wounded.
To-morrow he should be brought back to the hospital at Pont à Mousson
and thence invalided home.

Reverting to Bill, secretly the father's idol, in whose person he saw
his own lost youth renewed, the Chancellor smiled now, painting in
imagination on the darkness a picture of that charge of the French
square at Mars la Tour.  According to Herbert, who had put the thing
badly, Bill had had his horse shot, and jumped on another, taking a
comrade behind him as he rode off the field.

A fine story to write home to the boy's mother....  How her deep eyes
would glow and kindle as she read....  An exploit with which to
dazzle fat Borck, hated keeper of the King's Privy Purse....  Nor
must one omit to embody the incident in the next official
communication penned to Count Bernstorff, Prussian Ambassador in
London, who would be sure to retail it to some Lady-in-Waiting
possessing the ear of the Queen.  Lastly, what a magnificent anecdote
for the convivial stage of a Foreign Office Staff dinner, or an
official banquet, related with spirit garnished with exaggerations of
the pardonable harmless kind.  Indeed, with such embellishments he
subsequently related the slight episode, proving himself capable of
the very folly of paternal tenderness.  The picture cropped up
constantly among his dreams on this wild night of Gravelotte.  And
when the wan-faced Dawn peeped shuddering between her blood-stained
curtains, and the reveillé sounded, waking the living from their
sleep among the dead, so that their haggard uprising seemed as though
in answer to the trump of the Archangel of the Resurrection--he
heaved his giant's frame from the squalid bed to learn, with a savage
thrill of exultation, that Bazaine had fallen into the trap.

In the dead of night, behind the screen of the unsilenced French
batteries yet emplaced behind the high-walled farms of Montigny la
Grange, La Folie, and from thence to Point du Jour, the bleeding Army
of the Rhine had retreated to the treacherous shelter offered beneath
the guns of Metz.

Said the Warlock, smiling in his sunniest manner as he made his hasty
morning toilet in the shelter of a baggage-wagon tilt:

"Three French Marshals are twittering in this birdcage on the
Moselle--one Army has been shut up with them.  Another yet remains at
large, with Paris and the huge resources of France in rear of it."
He paused to absorb a pinch of snuff and extract a clean white shirt
from a small and shabby japanned tin field-case, then added: "A
France on the point of Revolution--an Army commanded by MacMahon, who
has been badly beaten, and has that Old Man of the Sea, the Third
Napoleon, sitting on his back wherever he goes!"  He put on the shirt
and emerged from temporary obscurity to finish.  "If the spirits of
the just be permitted knowledge of earthly matters, my beloved wife
Mary is pleased with her old man!"

And he equipped himself in his old war-harness, and crowned his old
wig with his battered war-helm, and got on his fine charger and rode
off to meet and confer with his King, the Chancellor, and the War
Minister, and issue instructions to his Chiefs of the various Staffs,
trolling even less tunefully than usual, another verse of his
favorite song:

  "And knew they, the shining stars above me,
    Of the bitterness of my woe,
  They would come down and bid her love me,
    Pleading: 'Ah! do not scorn him so!'"




XLVII

Rumor had it that the King, the Chancellor, Roon, the Royal Staff,
and the Tinsel Rabble, with the escort of red, blue, and green
Hussars, Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans, had ridden toward Flavigny.

The Warlock placidly followed, traversing the battlefield near
Rezonville.  Here bearer-parties of the German Ambulance Service,
with Red Cross helpers, Knights of St. John, volunteers and French
and German surgeons wearing the Geneva badge, were now arriving; and
some progress had already been made in the gigantic task of
separating the wounded from the dead.

The Iron Chancellor was found here, attended by his shadow,
Bismarck-Böhlen, sometimes dubbed "The Little Cousin," other whiles
"The Twopenny Roué," according to the humor of his powerful relative.
The Minister was glancing through the morning's letters, his cousin
was reading him extracts from the _Daily Telegraph_, a parcel of
English papers having arrived.  Hard by, squads of fatigue-men, aided
by bloused peasants, were working to finish the second of two
parallel trenches, in length some three hundred feet, near which had
been collected a huge mass of French and German corpses, many
half-naked, the majority of them still in uniform.  Carts lumbering
up with fresh loads to discharge continually, augmented the terrible
mound of bodies, a huge percentage hideously displaying the effects
of shell-fire, many in the initial stages of decomposition, hastened
by the sweltering and oppressive heat.

Soldiers went about with huge canvas sacks, filling these with zinc
identification-tags taken from the necks of their dead comrades,
gathering a harvest of watches and purses, the former sometimes of
such value, and the latter occasionally so well-filled with French
money as to suggest that they had previously been taken from the dead.

"_Ach Gott!_" the perplexed officer of Pioneers in superintendence of
the trenching-party kept saying: "More, more, and still more....
What is one to do with so many dead men?"

Some utterance of this kind reaching the ears of the Chancellor, he
turned in his saddle and called to the officer:

"Your trench is too deep, sir, and not half wide enough.  Three feet
is sufficient.  Lay them in as cooks dispose herrings in oil-pickle,
across in layers and not singly and lengthways--labor and space will
be economized thus."

"Alas, Excellency!" protested the officer, "will not such a method be
very unwholesome?  The churchyard at Flauville is already raised four
feet above the pavement of the church."

"Let them lay on fresh dead," said the Chancellor, smiling grimly,
"and stop when they reach to the level of the window-sills.  Thus our
good fellows will be able to listen to the Curé's Sunday address.
Meanwhile, bury thick."  He added, as Moltke rode up, pointing to the
ground now trodden into mud and littered with French schakos and
_képis_, Prussian helmets and schapkas, knapsacks, arms,
under-clothing, accouterments, brushes, razors, and shoes: "Would not
one call this 'Death's Rag Fair'?"  He added as the wind, blowing
over a battery of dead horses, brought with it an odor that made the
senses reel: "Or 'Death's Perfumery Shop' would be as appropriate a
title....  I must advise the King not to breathe this atmosphere
longer, fasting.  It might result in dysentery."

Moltke agreed, expanding his thin nostrils: "Truly, the effluvium is
exceedingly bad!"

"Hypocrite!" said the Chancellor, openly laughing.  "Do we not all
know that the bouquet of a battle-field covered with slain enemies is
sweeter to you than November violet-blooms."

"Both may be agreeable," said the old war-eagle, "in different
fashion; as the partition of a conquered province, and the
dismemberment of a truffled capon might afford pleasure of two kinds
to Your Excellency."

Said Bismarck, as his cousin reined back and joined the modest
personal staff of Moltke, following at some distance in the rear of
the Commander-in-Chief:

"I prefer the first, if the second appeals to my empty stomach.
Though we must not sell the bear's skin before we have killed the
bear!"

He went on, patting the sweating neck of the brown mare, who had
winced and started as yet another dead-cart shot out its dreadful
load to windward....

"The King has been in favor of keeping the country up to the Marne.
I have yet another idea, which may be too Utopian to realize.  A kind
of German colony--a neutral State of eight or ten million
inhabitants, free from the conscription, and whose taxes should flow
to Berlin.  France would thus lose a district from whence she draws
her best soldiers--one would cut her claws thus!"

Said Moltke, his clear eyes narrowing in merry wrinkles:

"And draw her teeth as well!"

The Chancellor went on:

"That the annexation of the piece of territory will give jaundice to
the French is a matter of no consequence.  Revenge should be made
impossible.  Even without annexation we must render them permanently
harmless before we risk their bite.  The surrender of the eastern
fortresses of France can alone serve our purpose.  We have bought
them with the best of our German blood!"

Agreed the Warlock: "Many noble Prussian families will be plunged in
mourning.  Wesdehlen and Reuss, Wedell and Finkenstein have been
killed--Rahden is most grievously wounded, and a whole crowd of
officers commanding regiments or battalions are either badly hurt or
dead.  I can but thank Divine Providence that I have suffered no
personal bereavement."

"I echo your thanksgiving," responded the Minister, "though some
pints of my own blood have vicariously been shed."

"I had heard--I had heard somewhat, but feared to touch upon the
matter," said the Warlock.  "With the younger olive-branch they tell
me all is well!"

The Chancellor answered, stammering slightly and looking straight in
the other's eyes:

"Bill rode off the field in safety, carrying two unhorsed comrades
out of the leaden hailstorm, one in each stirrup, Cossack-fashion,
and accommodating a th--a third on the crupper of his horse!"

"_Ei--ei_!  I had not heard these interesting particulars," exclaimed
Moltke, raising his hairless brows in apparent astonishment.  "I did
not know the brave young man had distinguished himself so much!  The
Countess will overflow with pride and gratitude....  She writes
regularly, I think Your Excellency told me?  Naturally she would be
solicitous for your health."

"I had a letter from her yesterday," returned Bismarck, "in which she
mingles, in equal doses, stern admonition and affectionate advice.
Thus, I am to avoid the French wines, which are known to be
gout-provoking, and be sure to return in time for the celebration of
our wedding-day....  While, remembering, however strongly Paris may
be fortified, that the walls of Jericho fell down when the trumpets
of Joshua were sounded--I am to give Your Excellency no peace, 'until
the modern Babylon is utterly destroyed.'"

"Ha, ha, ha!"  The Warlock laughed with boyish merriment, until the
water stood in his clear, keen eyes.  "Her Excellency, as I have
often told thee, Otto, possesses a personality of the antique order.
She is of the breed of Judith and Zenobia....  I would also say
Boadicea, but for the Countess's known antipathy to the British race.
So we are to destroy Paris, and what of the Bonapartes and Bourbons
and Orleans?...  Have we, then, no cut-and-dried instructions as to
what is to be done with these?"

The Chancellor returned, with immovable gravity of tone and feature,
belied by the amusement dancing in his eyes:

"We are to purge France of the whole lot of them.  Though--supposing
the Prince Imperial were to complete his education at a German
University, and thus attain to manhood surrounded by German
influences--Monseigneur Lulu might one day become a subaltern in our
Prussian Army--subsequently to completion of the customary period of
service in the ranks!"

"Capital.  Her Excellency is indeed a woman in a thousand."  And
Moltke fairly rocked in his saddle with laughter, finally having
recourse to the frayed cuff of his old uniform field-frock for the
mopping of his overflowing eyes.  "Thou must paint for the King," he
gasped, "that picture of Lulu as a Prussian private soldier.  Do not
fail to tell him--it will be sure to make him laugh."

Said the Chancellor, shrugging his great shoulders:

"He has ridden with Von Roon and the Tinsel Rabble in the direction
of Flavigny, where the French bombardment so greatly endangered him
yesterday.  Von Roon will be pouring into the royal ear dismal
details of our losses, which are to be estimated for the Berlin
newspapers at something under twenty thousand, including officers."

"Seventy thousand would be nearer the mark," said the Warlock
placidly.  "Nor do I regard it as a heavy price for such a victory as
we have won.  Roon, however, is not to be envied an unpleasant duty,
which, for my own part, I prefer, when possible, to leave to other
mouths than mine."

And leaving the battle-field they struck into a road in a cutting
leading east toward Flavigny, and bordered with cottages shattered
and scorched by shell-fire, most of them standing in gardens gay with
dahlias, sunflowers, snapdragons, marigolds, lavender, and phlox.
Every house that boasted a roof was full of wounded French and German
soldiers, most of them lying on bare boards or earthen floors.  Oaths
and cries of anguish came from kitchens that in virtue of their solid
tables had been converted into operating theaters;
ambulance-assistants emptied buckets of ensanguined water over the
gaily-colored flower-beds, while bare-armed surgeons, in
blood-stained aprons, came to the doors every other moment to cool
themselves, or fill their lungs with draughts of cleaner air.

"It is sad to see all this suffering," remarked the Chancellor, "or
would be, did one not know it unavoidable!"

Said the Warlock, smiling cheerfully:

"Blood and wounds, dying men and dead men, are the inseparable
concomitants of War.  One takes them then as natural, and pays no
heed to them.  Did armies fight with truncheons of sausages, and
dumplings stuffed with plums instead of iron shells full of shrapnel,
there would still be deaths in plenty."

The Chancellor said, laughing heartily:

"And the Field equipment of our Army surgeons would consist of
calomel and rhubarb-pills.  Here now are a collection of soaked
macaws and paroquets.  The fine feathers of the Napoleon's Guard
Imperial have suffered badly from last night's rain."

In two fields right and left of the road they followed were crowded
nearly four thousand French prisoners, under a heavy guard of
Mecklenburg infantry.  The Mecklenburgers were drinking their morning
coffee and munching Army bread and raw ham rations.  The emerald,
pale blue, and scarlet Imperial Dragoons and Cuirassiers, the
white-mantled, red-fezzed Chasseurs d'Afrique, the green-coated
Chasseurs à cheval, the gorgeous Guides and Lancers, the Voltigeurs,
and the red-breeched, blue-coated grenadiers belonging to individual
regiments, standing as if in the ranks, or lying down in groups upon
the muddy ground where they had spent the last night, looked with
hollow eyes of famine, upon their munching jailers, but disdained to
ask for food.

"They are wet," said Moltke, "for few of them have got their
greatcoats.  It is the love of display that leads the French soldier
to throw away what extra weight of covering he carries when he is in
the thick of a _mêlée_, or suddenly called upon to charge.  While our
stout fellows will come out of an assault with what they carried into
it."

"Or perhaps a little more!" hinted the Chancellor.

"It may be--it may be!" admitted the Field Marshal.  "The French love
for gold-carrying is the cause of that enrichment.  Hence most of
their Guard Cavalry officers carry beneath their tunics or in the
pockets of their tight pantaloons netted purses given them by their
women, that stick out in a tempting style.  A prod of our German
lance, or a rip from the bayonet, and out pops the purse into the
soldier's fist.  You would not call him a thief for taking what he
finds in this manner?"

"I cannot answer for myself," said the Chancellor, turning a laughing
look upon the speaker, "but I can safely predict that my wife would
exonerate him upon Scriptural authority.  By the way, I see that your
brigadiers have not thought it worth while to place the French
wounded under surveillance."  He pointed to a halting procession of
roughly bandaged casualties in torn and muddy uniforms.  "I have
already passed at least a thousand of these limping fellows in red
breeches, and of course there must be thousands more."

"How could they escape?" asked the Warlock, turning his ascetic,
hairless face upon the speaker.  "And did they succeed in doing so,
of what use would they be as combatants?  All these you see, have
they not been wounded by shell-splinters in the head or arms, or hit
in the legs and feet by our rifle bullets?  Why should we burden
ourselves with the maintenance of men who cannot fight against us?
and must be helpless burdens upon their country even were they within
the French lines?"

"I admit the clearness of your Excellency's judgment," said the
Minister, "even while I doubt whether, if some of these red-breeched
rascals happen to be in possession of concealed weapons--there would
not be an excellent opportunity, at this moment, for ridding France
of Bismarck or Moltke."

"Or both," the Warlock amended, "with the aid of a double-barreled
pistol.  Look here!  Was ever a more startling likeness between a
dead man and a living, than is presented at this moment before Your
Excellency and myself?"

And returning the salute of a young soldier in the white-faced blue
uniform of the Guards Infantry, who in the act of galloping past upon
a powerful if wearied beast, had checked his stride so as not to
splash mud upon the Chancellor and the great Field-Marshal, Moltke
signed to him to halt.

"That he is a relative of Max Valverden's," said Bismarck, "I would
have wagered you a dozen of Moselle, of Comet vintage, if Your
Excellency were not already inclined to bet on the relationship."

"I never bet," chirped Moltke, "except in boxes of chocolate and
gloves with my nieces, and then it is a matter of certainty
beforehand that the little girls are going to win!"  And he turned
his narrow, glittering gaze upon the object of his curiosity, who was
now fixed in the front attitude of attention, immovable as an
equestrian statue of painted stone.

"I will not detain you upon what is no doubt a pressing errand," said
the Chief of the Great Staff, smiling amiably in the Guardsman's
rigid countenance.  "I merely wished to ask your name, and why it is
that a private soldier of Guard Infantry happens to be riding an
officer's horse?"

"Pardon, General Field-Marshal!"  The statue blushed becomingly.  "My
name is Carl Bernhard von Schön Valverden, at the service of Your
Excellency.  Of my rank in the Army I am hardly at this moment
certain, as I was promoted Corporal and Sergeant yesterday, during
the action of the Guard at St. Privat and Amanvilliers, and am now
acting temporarily as junior Captain of my company, nearly all our
officers having been killed."

"I congratulate you, Sergeant!" rejoined the Field-Marshal cordially,
"and am glad that you, as successor to the family honors of an
officer who served the Prussian Army with distinction, seem likely to
follow in the steps of your relative.  Prut!--that was a close thing!"

"Hellishly so!" agreed Bismarck.

For the flushed and laughing face of Valverden had suddenly hardened
and sharpened.  With lightning quickness he had drawn a revolver from
a pouch strapped to his belt and fired across the withers of the big
brown mare bestridden by the Iron Chancellor.  As the single shot
rang out, another followed almost instantly, and the midmost of a
knot of three dismounted Lancers, their heads, legs, and arms swathed
in clumsy, blood-stained bandages, who had halted to rest by the side
of the muddy road, yelled shrilly and pitched heavily backward,
dropping, with the broken pair of clothes-props that had served him
as crutches, a cavalry holster-pistol that had exploded as it fell.

Said Valverden, stiffening his features in the endeavor to disguise
his almost passionate elation: "Your Excellencies will pardon me, but
I saw the fellow was dangerous...."

"He might with reason," the Chancellor answered, "have entertained a
similar idea of you!"  He turned to Moltke, saying:

"Will not Your Excellency give orders that the companions of these
would-be assassins--all upon the road who have witnessed the
attempted outrage--shall be shot without delay?  It strikes me also
that more stringent precautions must be taken with regard to
disarming wounded prisoners.  The man had a pistol--that goes for
much!"

"Certainly--certainly!" agreed Moltke, beckoning to an aide of his
small Staff, who followed at some distance.  He issued some brief
directions, speaking in an undertone, then said, smiling and turning
to Valverden:

"The late Count Max was an excellent marksman with the pistol.  You
seem to have inherited this talent of his!"

The Chancellor added, looking at the still smoking revolver: "You
have there a pretty little weapon, apparently of American make!"

"It is one of Colt's six-shooters," said Valverden, smiling.  "I
bought it from a non-commissioned officer quite recently, and have
practised with it in the trenches at the animate mark.  But of the
ammunition I got with it all has been expended save six cartridges,
one of which I have had the honor to dedicate to the service of Your
Excellencies."

Both the Excellencies laughed, Moltke saying:

"It would be a pity to spoil your shooting, Sergeant Count von Schön
Valverden, for want of a few cartridges.  Give me the caliber of your
weapon and I will engage to supply you with a few hundred.  And, as
to your promptitude may be owed the priceless life of Count Bismarck,
the silver-sword-knot must be the reward."

"Thanks, thanks!  Your Excellency!" stammered Valverden, grasping the
offered hand of the old warrior.

"And the King shall hear how important a service his newly promoted
officer has rendered him," appended the Chancellor, "in preserving to
the Throne and nation of Prussia the greatest of living strategists!"

"Under Divine Providence," said Moltke, devoutly raising his
forage-cap.

"Under Divine Providence," repeated the Chancellor, touching the peak
of his own.

He added, as Valverden, dismissed by a wave of the Chief's finger,
his blue eyes blazing, his blond face aglow with triumph, set his
borrowed spurs to the flanks of his late Captain's charger, and with
a showy bound and demi-volte, galloped furiously away:

"He is as vain as Count Max, but seems to possess more character.  I
prophesy he will go far!"

Moltke agreed, slightly glancing after the flying horseman:

"Far--if Heaven preserve him from the clutches of such women as
Adelaide de Bayard.  Wouldst thou believe, Otto, the she-fiend spread
her nets to catch that youngster, who out of dare-devilry prevailed
on an officer of her acquaintance to take him to her house?"

"So!"  Bismarck turned his large eyes on the withered eagle-face.
"Did the meeting ripen into intimacy?"

Moltke replied:

"Sufficiently so to cause Valverden's family acute apprehension.  One
would suppose that she first revolted, then attracted, then
charmed....  The Countess in the anguish of maternal solicitude wrote
a letter to the Colonel of Valverden's regiment....  Fortunately the
call to Active Service diverted the young man's thoughts elsewhere."

Bismarck said, smiling and smoothing his heavy gray mustache with his
ungloved right hand:

"And, happily for her intended victim, an accident befell the
sorceress, which blunted some of the arrows in her quiver of
irresistible charms!"




XLVIII

"Sad, sad!  I had not heard.  How did it happen?" asked Moltke,
elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.

"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums up in this
way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor Napoleon, having
performed his mission to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de
Bayard at a Sigmaringen hotel....  She is as clever and
light-fingered as she is, or was, beautiful----'

"I know, I know!" said Moltke.  "She sucked Straz dry of his store of
Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear from Your Excellency."

Returned the Chancellor:

"By drugging him--or so he vows!--she obtained those copies of his
instructions from the Emperor (with copies of his copies of the
telegrams sent by Prince Antony)--which I was privileged to show you
later on.  Subsequently, and in floods of artificial tears, she
awakened her victim, declaring she must return that instant to
Berlin.  Which she did--a special engine having been kept under steam
at the Sigmaringen railway station--in time to place the papers in
the hands for which they were destined.  The exquisite point of the
jest is that Straz accompanied her--subsequently discovering how
roundly he had been befooled!  But upon this point I am not
certain....  I only argue from the premises that when Delilah was
subsequently found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom
at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put up--Straz--who had
vanished--was the perpetrator of what Madame has since termed 'a
mysterious outrage.'"

"He took the money?" Moltke queried.

"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had paid her a few hours
previously.  Twenty thousand marks in honest Prussian bank-notes.
Some of them Straz changed before he left Berlin.  He is now here in
France, and that is all I care to know of him at present.  But in the
eyes of every man she now encounters, Madame will read something that
will keep her animosity alive."

"So changed, is she?" asked Moltke, with interest.

"So changed is she, in spite of the aid of cosmetics, that as I
looked at her I was minded to exclaim with the Prophet Ezekiel:
_Devourer of men ... thou shalt devour men no more!_"

The speaker added:

"Unless vicariously, for the De Bayard has a daughter--not destitute
of charms, if there be truth in the description given me by her
mother, when the woman offered, for a consideration, to sell the girl
to me!"

"Prut!" said Moltke, reddening angrily and frowning.  "Decency
demands that such vileness be kept hid!"

Said the Chancellor, shrugging indifferently:

"Decency and such women as Max Valverden's ex-mistress have long
ceased to be on nodding terms.  To do Madame justice, she flew at
higher game than a mere Prussian Minister.  Her idea was to influence
a future Emperor, in the person of Badinguet's heir."

Moltke wrinkled up his transparent, arched nostrils, as though an
unpleasant odor had afflicted them:

"_Pfui!_--what beastliness! what abomination!  And the boy but
fifteen, and childish for his age!"

"And cleanly of habit and thought," added Bismarck, "considering his
paternity, and the sort of people who habitually surround him."  He
turned slightly in his saddle as carbine-shots rang out, followed by
oaths, shouts, and in the distance behind them muscular blows: "The
gendarmery of the Württembergers are carrying out your orders in a
general _battue_.  It should be enforced as an iron rule never to be
infringed or departed from, that not only those soldiers, reduced to
the level of non-combatants--who attempt to revenge the misfortunes
of their Army by acts of violence--but those who witness such acts
are to be instantly shot.  More, the rule should extend to private
persons: I would without mercy shoot or hang all those who do not
treat as sacredly inviolate the persons of their conquerors!"

His deep-cut nostrils expanded, his blood-tinged blue eyes blazed
under the heavy eyebrows, the corners of his mouth clamped downward,
giving to the thick mustache a certain appearance of solidity,
typical of the man, and suggesting a human mask carved in granite, or
cast in bronze and colored with the hues of life.  His resonant voice
had the clang and timbre of a war-gong, forged of metal tempered by
Pagan priests in blood of human victims.  And he went on, his
clenched right hand beating the measure of his words upon his solid
thigh:

"I speak from the inner depths, at the promptings of a profound
conviction.  Strictness--unmerciful strictness--should be wielded, to
bring home to the innocent and the guilty, the feeble as well as the
powerful, the horror and hideousness of War.  And yet"--his voice
assumed a milder tone, the somber frown relaxed, and the tense
corners of the deep-cut mouth twitched a little: "And yet wilt thou
credit that during the frightful carnage of the last two days--there
have been moments when my bowels melted to water--when Pity and
Compunction have gripped me by the throat?"

"_Ach-ach!_" ejaculated Moltke, turning his clear red-rimmed eyes
wonderingly upon the heavy features whose ruddy color had faded to
grayish: "Thou wast unfed, or hadst made some rough soldier's meal
that disagreed with thee.  Man's stomach will upon such occasions
chide with the very voice of conscience.  Unavoidable horrors need
not cause twinges.  Besides, pity and compunction are felt by my
niece Gusta when she has trodden upon her lapdog's tail....  I am
myself agitated by these sentiments when Gusta exhibits to me her
chilblains....  In War--especially a recklessly provoked war of
attack, such as this--neither pity nor compunction can be tolerated.
Grief of heart, I have been hitherto spared by Heaven's gracious
preservation of those dear to me.  Thou art nearly as favored, for
the wound of Herbert is comparatively slight, and Bill--the hero of
the astonishing episode thou hast related--has come off the field not
only with four--I think Your Excellency mentioned four--rescued
comrades, but without a scratch upon his skin?"

The simple, serious, almost childish tone of his harangue brought
back the thunderclouds to the forehead of the Man of Iron.  His grim
mouth set, his bulldog jaw thrust forward, a dull cloud of red swept
upward to his temples, chasing the sickly grayish hue.  He said,
stammering in his characteristic manner:

"Your Ex--Your Excellency and myself have, as you say, been spared
the bereavement which will presently plunge the noblest Prussian
families into mourning.  But Heaven--looking down upon the Gorze
Road, now white with the bodies of Von Bredow's Cuirassiers--or
contemplating the field of Mars la Tour, heaped with the corpses of
our Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans--might be inclined to disclaim
arch-responsibility for the orders that in one instance hurled
suss--six Prussian squadrons upon a French Infantry Division and the
combined strength of Frossard's batteries, and in the other, pitted
against eight regiments of French Imperial Guard Cavalry Von Barby's
Heavy Brigade."

"_Ei!_" said Moltke, placidly ignoring the irony, but with a rosy
heightening of the color in his wrinkled cheeks: "And Heaven would be
in the right of it.  Von Alvensleben in the first case, General
Voights-Rhetz in the second, had been told in such and such an
emergency to do thus--and thus.  In the Wars of Joshua and David, as
recorded in Holy Scripture, Heaven assumed the chief generalship.  In
the War of Germany with France, in this year of 1870, Heaven is
pleased to let Moltke have his own way."

Verbal thrusts and riposte had the grind of edged steel on steel.

The Chancellor returned with elaborate suavity:

"And yet--I quote Your Excellency's own utterance, such use of
cavalry as I have quoted has been condemned by Moltke as
unjustifiable."

"And Moltke was right," trumpeted the indomitable veteran, "only you
have not quoted me right.  Such use of cavalry by a general is
unjustifiable.  Unjustifiable--absolutely--unless he wins!"  He
added, rather nettled by the Chancellor's criticism:

"Here we part, as I ride toward Gorze to visit the scene of Von
Bredow's brilliant exploit, in the course of which, though Your
Excellency has omitted to mention it, the French battery was cut to
pieces, and an infantry column ridden down.  Thus the loss of life in
a military sense weighs nothing against the advantage!"

And stiffly returning the Minister's salute, the Warlock galloped
away.


"I have trodden on Moltke's corns," said Bismarck, laughing, as his
cousin Bismarck-Böhlen rode up to join him.  "He grew testy on being
twitted with our losses in cavalry."  He added, as the low hedges
bounding the road vanished, and the arena of the previous afternoon's
conflict opened before them: "There is the King, whose face Roon has
lengthened with tremendous lists of losses on our side.  It will now
be my business to shorten the royal countenance again.  Roon and I
resemble Ixel and Axel in the child's story-book, only that we manage
better on the whole!"  He explained as his cousin professed ignorance
of the legend: "Ixel and Axel were possessed of a magical birth-gift,
which worked in the same way, but differently....  Thus, Axel had a
little finger that stirred sweet, while Ixel's stirred sour, only
neither could remember to use his gift properly.  Thus, Ixel would
sour the coffee in the pot, spoil the beer, and turn the jelly in the
house-mother's pipkins, while Axel would stir the sauer-kraut sweet
and make sweet calf's head with cabbages!"  He added, laughing: "If a
dish thus flavored were now set before me, I should certainly make
short work of it.  Save for a bowl of the soldier's pea-soup given me
by General von Goeben this morning--my stomach would now be as empty
as the inside of Louis Napoleon's head!"


The scene of the Homeric battle of the previous afternoon, watched by
the King, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke from the ridge south of
Flavigny, was indescribable.  Blue Prussian infantry, mingled with
Uhlan lancers, Dragoons, and mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard,
covered the wide stretch of level common-ground between the Bois de
Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.  So high were piled the bodies of
dead men and dead horses, mingled with that sorrowful _débris_ of
shattered arms, scattered accouterments and ownerless headgear, that
live men walked through narrow lanes and crevasses opening here and
there among them, and failed to reach the surface at the full stretch
of the arm.

Bearer-sections of the German Ambulance were looking for survivors,
burial-parties were collecting the German dead.  Here and there the
narrow lanes that ended nowhere had become crooked thoroughfares,
owing to these efforts and the labor of bands of volunteers and
peasants working under the Red Cross.

P. C. Breagh was one of these toilers.  On the previous day he had
helped the peasants clear the Red Ravine under the direction of the
Gorze Sisters of Mercy, and darkness falling before the gruesome task
was ended, he had kept on by torch and lantern-light until brain and
muscles gave in.  Then, staggering with weariness, he had gone back
with the Sisters to their convent--had been dried and warmed, fed
with soup and bread, stewed fruit and coffee, and had slept
dreamlessly in the clean spare bed at their gardener's cottage--to
wake, refreshed, in the light of a new day.

Morning had found every house in Gorze crammed with French and German
wounded, and every able-bodied resident, willingly or otherwise,
impressed into the service of the Red Cross.  One single lady of the
Sister's acquaintance, whose villa had been forcibly turned into a
hospital, had retired to sleep off a nervous headache, setting her
maid to guard her bedroom door.  Which door, after an interval of
trampling and violent argument, had been kicked open, revealing the
kicker in the person of a Prussian General, muddy to the whiskers,
hoarse from exposure and shouting, and red-eyed from the lack of
sleep, who there and then forcibly ejected the hapless spinster from
her bed, and telling her go and nurse the wounded, pulled off his
spurred boots, and promptly installed himself in her place.

This was mild treatment, even tender, to the usage received by many
other harmless non-combatants.  P. C. Breagh had seen an elderly
priest savagely hit in the face by a dismounted Uhlan, whom he had
unintentionally jostled in helping to lift a disabled French soldier
into a cart.

And he had been witness of other outrages.  He had seen a wayside
cabaret gutted, and the casks hauled up from the cellar, set up on
end, unheaded, and emptied by a party of blue infantry-men.  When
they had dipped in and filled their water-bottles, they had drunk out
of their helmets, and when they could drink no more, they had emptied
out the wine upon the ground before the bush-decorated doorway, and
with brutal jests and laughter watched the red stuff trickle away.

To this senseless waste the host had offered no objection.  A blow
from a gun-butt had previously knocked him senseless, and his wife,
with her black hair hanging wildly over her shoulders, and her face
blurred with tears and pale with terror, was trying to bring him
round again.




XLIX

The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture--made
him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut
his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm....  It
was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified.  It was
awful--inconceivably awful....  He found himself muttering:

"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"

With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as
far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by
using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:

"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War--as I
gassed--not twenty-four hours ago--could be set down where I stand
now, they'd find out, as I have found--that they didn't know what
they were talking about....  Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw
that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse,
curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer
crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"

He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental
equilibrium.  We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a
marvel when we find ourselves strong.  He found the nausea going and
the dimness clearing from his vision.  He could even breathe the
dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage,
stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell
himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with
ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and
flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls--flapping heavily from one
place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet,
between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"

Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the
titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest
P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the
Babes in the Wood.  Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor
greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew.  Hares, rendered
tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men,
their natural enemies.

Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to
have raged desperately.  For it was high-heaped with bodies of the
green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about
with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats.  The black and white
lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that
brought with it the appalling savor of death....

One had come to work, not to make notes.  P. C. Breagh got down from
the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and
looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin.  A
bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him.  They
were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely.  A
scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made
of hurdles and sacks and poles.

Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure.  Was it a young
girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly
clad?  A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands
were knitted across the narrow bosom.  A white linen armlet with the
badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain
black merino dress.  The little, daintily shod feet that showed under
the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them.  Through the
veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side,
restlessly seeking....

P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained
apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of
those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all
quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of
battle, their own wounded or dead.

She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking
from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for
the face, it was quite plain.  Her look passed over bodies that did
not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red
pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial.  She
ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache
and the Imperial tuft.

For whom did she seek?  A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her
path?  Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might
bring to an end that anguished search....  The impact seemed so
imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to
her.  He got out in a gasping croak:

"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake,
don't touch it--it's a live shell!" ...

She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who
uttered it had spoken in his own tongue.  The edge of her skirt
brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous
death.  But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken
limber--would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh.  Even as the slight
figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of
Juliette.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard....  Madame..."

"Ah, it is you--it is you!" she said gaspingly.

And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong
hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.

They were so cold, so cold and tiny.  They stirred in his grasp like
little half-frozen birds.  She freed one, and put aside the heavy
veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness....  She
said--in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:

"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten
me.  Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!--for the
love of charity--do not desert me!  Me, I am in the greatest
extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now.  In the midst
of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who
is all the world to me....  For that I may find him living I do not
dare to hope..."

P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:

"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"

She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:

"Not my husband.  My father, sir.  It is since a week that I returned
from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the
Prussians.  The intelligence was false--I afterward learned.  How--I
cannot now tell you.  At this moment, and in the presence of all
these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful,
I can remember nothing very well.  But this--that I have come from
Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."

"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without
papers?..."  His face expressed the blankest surprise.

"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not
say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel.
When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of
which I returned to Verdun.  From Verdun, in a train full of French
wounded--in a _fiacre_ part of the way--in a peasant's cart the
remaining distance--I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the
Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain.  But at Plappeville
they detained me.  A great battle was raging....  What thunder of
guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation,
wounds, and death did I not behold!..."

She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt
for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that
stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips.  And
P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder
at the courage that bore the frail creature up.

"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant
woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the
milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread.  News came before day,
brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that
the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine
had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz.
I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment,
the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard.  The reply was: 'Three
regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor.  You
will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and
the Bois de Gaumont.'  I cried out then, for the words had pierced me
like sharp iron.  I would have run out of the house to find my
father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red
Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through
the village on the way to this terrible place.  They brought me with
them--'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the
brassard of the Rouge Croix.'  This they put upon me, and then they
bring me with them.  Now I know not where they are, but I have found
you.  Help me, monsieur--and I will pray for you until I die!"

She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands
together--would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him
the better, if he had seemed to delay.  But he caught fire at her
flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross
necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber
to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:

"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search
for him--and where? ... Tell me ...  the regiment and the color of
the uniform?"

Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing
of one of the rigid figures near them.  He noted the red and green
plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of
the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian
Dragoon.  He muttered, even while mentally registering other details
of the Chasseur's uniform--noting the crest embroidered on the green
schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead
rider's thigh:

"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other
that they fought like devils yesterday....  Half a dozen regiments
might have been cut up here!  And we have to find one man somewhere
in a square mile of piled-up bodies....  If one only had a bloodhound
and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."

Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging
dewlap.  The issue of the search was to prove this.  For an hour, as
it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of
dead men.  Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three
scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped
of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning,
the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation
of musketry.  Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth
clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.

About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the
previous day had raged--the billows of the sea of Death had beaten
fiercely.  The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped
sharply--from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and
equine.  But the slender figure in black moved between them--stooped
to pass under them, seldom faltering.  When the young man who
followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without
answering, and kept on.  The silent gesture meant:

"Not yet!  A little farther still!...  Be patient with me, I beg of
you!"

For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as
though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously
distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all
staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by
myriads of stiffened arms.

She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her
companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely
peaked and shrunken:

"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is
failing....  See, see!  O Mother of God!...  O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"

The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's
blood to snow-water.  He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of
her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from
some sight of intolerable horror:

"Wait!  For God's sake!  Wait!...  Let me!..."

She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a
baby's.  She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of
fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a
horse's rigid hind-limb.  When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was
crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone
core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue
hand.

It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the
long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust.
But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have
known....

Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled
head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies.  She
saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there.  She
kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it.  Ophelia
was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the
chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish
tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:

"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted
again--never!  Indeed, I have tried to obey thee--but I could not
help coming back because I love thee so!...  Thou hast been wounded,
but I will nurse thee and cure thee.  When thou art well again we
will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come.
For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own
father!...  I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."

She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under
the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard
from her view.  One of them was the body of the young subaltern who
had borne the standard.  Over him sprawled the colossal form of a
German officer of Dragoons.  He was not dead, for he moved, and blood
was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his
shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped
scalp of his unhelmeted head.

"Help!  Some drink!  _Donner!_ how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.

P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to
him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite
side.  Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was
about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the
red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of
Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the
level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough
Teutonic gutturals:

"Hereabouts or near.  Begin this--widening the way until carts can
get through to be loaded....  _Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ is that a dog up
there?"

Another voice answered:

"No, _Herr_ Sergeant.  It is either a nun or a woman!"

The Sergeant thundered:

"You silly sheepshead!  Aren't nuns women?  But you _verdammte_
Catholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky.  Turn her out
of that--nun or woman!"

With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and
temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette.  He thrust
his head forward, peering down from his eyrie.  The crouching little
shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog.  Near her stood a
soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry.
It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil
farewell.  Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance
of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by
mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar
across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard.
He bellowed to the ex-chemist:

"Speak to her!  Ask what is her business."

The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to
put a question.  She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then
resumed her previous attitude.  Interrogated from below, Private Kunz
responded:

"She is deaf, or mad.  She only shakes and stares at one!"

The Sergeant bellowed:

"Shout in her ear, fool!  You are not courting your sweetheart!  Tell
her to get up and move out of this!"

Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear
shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his
superior.  She gave no sign of having heard.  Copper-red with
indignation, the Sergeant commanded:

"Turn her out, then!  Promptly up with the baggage!"

Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally.  At the
touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face
upon the rigid hand she held.  And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned
his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the
summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging
trailing in his wake.  Casting caution to the winds, he shouted
savagely to the ex-chemist:

"Let the lady go!  Take your hand off!  Damn you!--do you hear?"

The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant.  For
an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition.  The
next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found
himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian
"needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind
which his heart hammered and bumped.  There was a creaking of leather
then--and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse
reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space.  Over the
heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious
eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a
gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage
cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred
jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.

"Whom have we English here?  Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"

From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy
domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled
young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude
of Sergeant Schmidt.  He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became
vertical.  He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh
drew near.  And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded
suddenly from about the Englishman....  He was back in the
tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin.  And
the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye
of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:

"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume
upon the fact too rashly.  Had I not been within earshot just now,
you would have paid with your life for your interference.  German
military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not
to be turned aside."

P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:

"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."

"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice
coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover,
too much may be risked and lost!"

P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes
that blazed tigerishly:

"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th
Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."

"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"

At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting
a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the
Sergeant and his men.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.

"Excellency, she does not hear you!  The shock has been too
terrible," Carolan was beginning.  He was brusquely interrupted with:

"People usually listen when I speak to them."  And the curt command
was issued--in French, suave and polished:

"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to
me!"

The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted.  He turned her head
with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other
female thing.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"

This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched
face his way.  In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild
eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard.  Then slowly, as though his
powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her
feet before him.  He said, in cool, incisive accents:

"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier.  I myself had the
privilege of seeing how he died.  I wish such a man had served a
better master!..."

She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the
sentence:

"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands
now!"

His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation.  He said
in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:

"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion.  The battle-field
is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls....
In your own best interests I counsel you to return home."  He
added--and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance
vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer--or under the
escort of this young Englishman....  I will promise you that your
father's body shall be treated with respect!"  His heavy eyes fell on
the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude
of salute.  "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he
added, grimly enough.

"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him.  He glanced over his
shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up
and was standing in the alleyway:

"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by
the daughter."  He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your
veil!"

She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who
received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb.
Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle,
backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long,
vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage
eyes resentfully.  From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred
with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama
just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in
charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.

But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching
her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as
to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:

"Separate grave ... marked to find easily.  All respect ... answer to
me!"

More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing.  For God had
remembered her, and sent her tears at last.

She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled
envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own
handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the
777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of
France, at Metz.  And the intuition of love told her that the dead
man must have carried this, the last message received from his
daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed
it--as in very truth we know he had--shortly before he died.

"See, see, my friend!  Behold my own letter.  His sacred blood has
stained it....  His lips perhaps have pressed it!--it well may be
that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me
until my hand is cold as this is!  Adieu, dear hand!"  She knelt down
to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force--would have returned
for a last caress--a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered
desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling
looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his
arms and carried her away.

"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested.
"See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it _convenable_ that a
gentleman should carry a lady so!..."

Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant.
As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon
his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.

What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing
in his arms his worshiped lady?  He was footsore and aching in every
bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion.  His heart
pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it
and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright.
Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in
the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer.  And as
he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood
burgeoned into flower.  He might look back upon his boyhood with
regret, contempt, or tenderness....  He would never be a boy again.




L

The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when
carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.

Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over roads strewn
with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and water-bottles, boxes of
biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves discarded by troops retiring in
haste, the appearance of a very tall peasant leading a little
white-faced donkey came as an unspeakably welcome relief.  For a
franc in good French money the owner of the donkey was more than
willing to hire out his beast.  Thus, seated on this humble animal,
P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where she had passed
the previous night.

It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville.  To
reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert, threaded
the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed the railroad, unmolested by
the Prussian patrols, and, following narrow lanes hidden between
copses, came at last upon its single street.

Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received Juliette with
cries of welcome and open arms.  Mademoiselle should have something
better than dry bread on this occasion, for a neighbor had that
morning killed a calf.  Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter--for some
of the hens, scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun
laying--and an omelette with fine herbs.  No less than young
demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment, and here behold,
English Monsieur accompanying Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed
in the corner of the kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the
person of my Cousin Boisset.  Pardon that he cannot rise to salute
you, for the Prussians have made it impossible.  During the battle of
St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was twice wounded while
serving with the Eighteenth Field Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....

Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it with vivacity
in spite of his evident pain.  His bandaged head and the useless leg
roughly swathed in a homespun towel of Madame Guyot's told their
story no less than his nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.

"We were overcome by force of numbers....  The Germans know nothing
of scientific warfare....  Believe me, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we
swept them down in rows like ninepins painted black.  At twelve
hundred yards, and again at fourteen hundred--and the more we killed
the more there were to kill.  Name of a pipe!--pardon,
Mademoiselle!--it was inconceivable!  We were compelled at length to
cease our fire because our ammunition failed us, and it was not
possible to butcher any more!--Worst of all, our generals lost their
heads, and issued contradictory orders!--Commissariat broke down
before the ammunition-service--we had had nothing to eat for two
days--then we ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns....
So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have taken cover,
being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry and artillery, for three
whole hours!--Three solid hours, Monsieur and Mademoiselle--until we
were remembered, and ordered to retire.  When the order came, few
officers remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left
to us.  Of the three batteries of our brigade Division, two-thirds
lay dead upon the field.  With my wounded leg trailing behind me, I
crawled over rank after rank of bodies, pausing over many of my old
comrades....  Then I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of
saplings I cut down with my penknife.  With the day I reached my
cousin's house....  You may say 'All this is War'--but what kind of
War? is what I ask you....  I--a soldier when has fought and bled for
France!"

It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner of the
blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled in the leaden stupor
that is born of grief and fatigue:

"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question....  I am
young and ignorant, but I have read and thought much.  And now I have
experienced what never can be forgotten....  I have sat by the corpse
of my father on the battlefield....  I have looked in the face of the
great man who is my country's cruel enemy...."

Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet, started and
looked round from her sputtering, savory-smelling cookery.  The
wounded gunner, propped up on the pallet-bed that stood in the corner
of the low-ceiled, stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a
resolute bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery
voice:

"It is Bismarck's War," she said.  "Stone by stone he has built up
Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed up all Germany.  He has
seen--this huge man of colossal ambitions--that the road to Power
greater still leads through the gate of France.  And Diplomacy could
not steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."

"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully, "it would
never have opened while a French soldier was left alive--if we had
not been betrayed!  Have you seen the picture of Cham in last week's
_Charivari_?  It reached my battery through one of our officers.  It
is true--_mon Dieu!_--it is desperately true.  There is the Little
Napoleon of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered
rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great Napoleon.  He
begs at the street-corner for sous--and even the prostitute turns
away from the impostor.  'The End of the Legend!' is written
underneath.  It is furiously chic and terribly clever--and
frightfully true, Mademoiselle.  For the Napoleonic legend is done
with--finished, for good and all!"

She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had died out.
With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and silver crucifix of her
rosary, she was murmuring a prayer--doubtless for her father's soul.
Seeing her thus absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion,
shrugged significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he
would have said:

"It is well that women have faith in Heaven.  See!--she turns to her
beads, the poor little one.  She is able to pray!--that is
fortunate....  Otherwise, grief would turn her brain!"

Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a backless
straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner, raptly contemplating the
small, sorrowful face, the gunner shrugged again, and exchanged a
wink of intelligence with Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan
from the fire, proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.

Who has loved and does not remember the first meal partaken in the
company of the beloved.  To one guest at Madame Guyot's board, the
fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten from her coarse platters of
red-flowered crockery, the home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine,
the country cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as
dessert, made a banquet worthy of the gods.  To sit opposite that
little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids, and watch
her brave pretense of relishing their hostess' victuals, would have
been torture had it not been bliss.

When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs shaken out upon
the threshold for the hungry poultry, the cat accommodated with a
saucer of scraps, and the hearth swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the
cuckoo-clock that had hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the
half-hour, got up and reluctantly tore himself away.

"You are going?...  Back to _him_?...  To make sure that those
soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de Bismarck?  Ah! that is what
I have been praying for!  Our Lady has put it into your head."

She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in her bosom.
Of what else should de Bayard's daughter have been thinking, P. C.
Breagh asked himself.  He entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully
questioning:

"You won't leave this place until I come back?  Pray do not!...
Promise me!"

The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman of the
cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar accent of the
English words.  Juliette answered in the same tongue:

"Monsieur, I give you my _parole_ of honor.  When you come back to
this house, if I am alive, you will find me here, under the _manteau_
of Our Lady.  May she protect and guard you.  _Au revoir!_..."

P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big hand.  She
considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her own in the broad,
blistered palm.  As he shut his strong fingers over the fragile
captive, it struggled, then lay still, throbbing like some small
imprisoned bird.  And a dimness came before his eyes, and he
hurriedly released her, stammering:

"Take--take care of yourself, won't you?  I'll--not be very long
away!"

She called him back.  He knew a shock of joy and hurried toward her.
She slipped her Rosary into his hand with a gold coin, faltering with
eyes brimful, and quivering lips:

"This ... to be buried with him!...  This--for a priest to read the
Office and offer Mass ... if one can be discovered!...  Oh! if I
might come with you!... but no!--I will not be unreasonable.  Again,
it must not be that you carry me, as you did to-day!"

He trembled at the poignant recollection.  She went on, breathing
fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed scillas, to
his--laying her small hand timidly on his shabby sleeve.

"Me, I have an idea!...  There is now in Heaven a great saint who was
priest of a little village that lies not far from here....  Since he
died, it is eleven years....  I speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney,
the Blessed Curé of Ars...."

P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she mentioned.
She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold of the rough brown
sleeve:

"Sacrifice--mortification--the Cross--these things to the holy Curé
were the Keys of Heaven.  The poorest and simplest of his peasants
was not poorer or simpler than he.  Even before his death Our Lord
gave him the grace to perform miracles, and always did Our Lady
regard him with tenderness....  See you well, I will pray to the
Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may send a holy
priest to read the Office for the dead!"

Her voice broke, and the bright tears brimmed over her pure
underlids.  At the sight a wave of tenderness surged up in him, pure
of all sensuous passion, knowing only the overwhelming desire to
serve, and comfort, and protect....  He bent his head, and kissed the
little hand, before he turned and went from her.  When he glanced
back, midway clown the wide dusty street of the hamlet of scattered
cottages, Juliette was standing in the sunshine, looking earnestly
after him.




LI

She could think clearly and remember again.  The confusion in her
overwrought brain gradually subsided.  She went back to the fatal
days when the news of the defeats of Wörth and Spicheren rushed
shrieking through France and Belgium, and the 16th of August brought
word of Bazaine's intercepted retreat from Metz.  That day a young
girl, sitting under the grisly wing of Madame Tessier at the _table
d'hôte_ of the Hôtel de Flandre, in Brussels, had risen up as pale as
death and hurried from the room.

The picture was clear-cut, definite as a photograph.  She saw the
tables in confusion....  French guests uprising, the men exclaiming,
and the ladies in tears,--Belgians sympathizing--Teutons exchanging
congratulatory eye-glances, and smiles not at all concealed.  As the
white girl passed the chair from which a German cavalry officer had
risen, he whipped the obstacle out of her way with an ogle and a bow.
And Juliette, covering her eyes as though the sight of him scorched
them, had fled past him....  As she quitted the _salle à manger_, the
voice of Madame Tessier had reached her, saying grimly to the dandy:

"A civility from one of your nation at such a moment is an insult,
Monsieur."

And Madame, with bristling mustaches, had also risen, and gone in
search of her daughter-in-law elect, to be arrested at the foot of
the grand staircase by a waiter with the intelligence that
Mademoiselle had gone to her room to lie down, and begged not to be
disturbed....  To which apartment, it being on the third floor,
Madame Tessier--having wound up the twelve-o'clock _déjeuner_ of hot
meats and vegetables and salad with coffee and pastry,--did not
follow her.  Had she braved the ascent, this story would have ended
in quite a different way.

Upon this day, that saw the battle of Mars la Tour, Juliette would
not have met the elegant, self-possessed, ingratiating lady who had
spoken to her so amiably on the previous afternoon.  When--Madame
Tessier being engaged in changing a French _billet de banque_ into
Belgian money--Juliette had inquired for letters at the bureau.

"'Mademoiselle de Bayard.' ... Unhappily there is not a single letter
for Mademoiselle de Bayard..." had said the curled and whiskered
functionary, taking an envelope from compartment "B" of the green
baize-covered letter-rack, and handing it to this lady, who stood
immediately behind.

Juliette had found it impossible not to see the address upon this
letter:

  "To MADAME DE BATE,
    "HÔTEL DE FLANDRE,
      "BRUSSELS,"

written in rather a vulgar scrawl.  It carried extra stamps, and
looked bulky.  And the elegantly-gloved hand that was extended to
take it, recoiled from the contact as though the envelope had
concealed a scorpion.

The owner of the hand had regarded Mademoiselle de Bayard with a
piercing and exhaustive scrutiny, even as she slipped the letter into
a gold-mounted reticule, and snapped the spring tight.  She had
observed in soft and well-bred accents:

"Letters from one we love are enhanced in value, when the writer must
lay down the sword to use the pen...."

Through a black lace veil so thickly flowered as to suggest a mask, a
pair of brilliant eyes glittered at Juliette.  What dazzling teeth
were revealed by the crimson lips that smiled....  The well-bred
voice added, with an entrancing touch of melancholy:

"Under other circumstances, to address Mademoiselle would be held a
liberty--the speaker being a stranger.  Yet as the wife of a French
officer of the Imperial Guard,--I may be pardoned for presuming in my
young country-woman an anxiety similar to my own?..."

"Ah, Madame," Juliette had said impulsively, "who is there would not
pardon you?"

And she had looked with a young girl's honest admiration at the
sumptuous form in the perfectly-appointed dress.  When the lady had
said, with brilliant eyes fixed on her:

"Were this letter not from my husband, I could wish it had been for
you," she continued: "Does Mademoiselle know M. de Baye's regiment?
The 777th Mounted Chasseurs...?"

"My father commands it, Madame," Juliette had proudly answered.  And
an animated conversation would have sprung from this answer, but
Madame Tessier turned round rather sharply, and the lady, with a
slight, graceful inclination, had glided rather rapidly away.

Later, Juliette had encountered Madame de Baye upon the staircase,
and had received another of her brilliant glances, and another of her
entrancing smiles.  And, being lonely in this strange land, and
athirst for interest and companionship, the young girl had woven a
little romance out of this passing acquaintanceship.

Now as she reached her room, trembling and ready to sink with
excitement and agitation, a woman stopped her in the corridor, who
looked like a lady's maid of the better class.  Well mannered, smart
and discreet, she dropped Mademoiselle de Bayard an ingratiating
curtsey, handing her at the same time a little three-cornered note.

As the messenger plainly waited for an answer, Juliette unfolded the
delicately perfumed cocked-hat.  This is what she read in a
finely-pointed feminine caligraphy, with lasso-loops to all the
"g's," "y's," and "h's," and "s's" of the prolonged, old-fashioned
kind.

The maid had penned it at the dictation of her mistress, who for an
unexplained reason preferred another hand to bait her hook.  This is
what Juliette read between her heart-beats, striving to check her
flowing tears, and the sobs that rose in her throat:


"_To you, Mademoiselle, so spirituelle, gentille and amiable, I am
fated, alas! to cause the greatest grief.  I have received the most
terrible news of my husband's regiment.  The reports of the Emperor's
resignation are false from the beginning.  The Army of Metz,
Mademoiselle, has encountered Prussian forces....  Where I know not,
but with terrible loss!  My Victor has been dangerously wounded and
conveyed to hospital at Metz.  I fly thither on the wings of anxiety
and tenderness to receive too possibly! his final kiss.  Also I learn
that M. le Colonel de Bayard has been taken prisoner....  My pen
trembles as I write the words._

"_Since I may not tender them personally, receive, Mademoiselle, my
condolences and farewells.  May Heaven protect you!_

  "_Distractedly and devotedly,_
        "A. DE BATE."


Madame was packing, said the maid upon whom Juliette turned with a
breathless inquiry.  Without doubt Madame would receive
Mademoiselle....  And, having previously been primed with
instructions, Mariette, whom not so long ago we encountered in
Berlin, conducted Mademoiselle to a door upon the lower landing, and
having knocked discreetly ushered the young lady in.

It was a bedroom crowded with trunks and imperials, none of which
seemed to have been unpacked.  The lovely lady of the veil was
standing near the toilette-table in a thoughtful pose which did
justice to her figure and the beauty of her profile.  She had removed
her veil and held it in her hand, as she changed the position of a
jeweled comb in her hair....  She looked round as the door opened.
Her brilliant eyes, ruddy-brown as Persian sard or Brazilian
tourmaline, encountered the tearful eyes of Juliette.  She advanced
to meet the girl with effusive tenderness, crying:

"Alas, poor little one!  From my heart I pity you!..."

She was not so beautiful, unveiled, as she had appeared behind her
mask of black lace flowers.  The handsome eyes were bloodshot and too
prominent.  There were faint dusky-red streaks showing through the
purchased roses and lilies of her complexion; horizontal marks,
resembling the congenital disfigurement known as "port-wine stain."
And withal she was an attractive woman of fascinating manners.  And
her sympathy seemed genuine, and yet--for some incomprehensible
reason, Juliette trembled at and shrank from her touch....

"You are too good to receive me--you who are also suffering!..."  She
tried to collect herself, and not cause distress.  "How I pity you I
cannot tell you! but at least you have the knowledge that you are
returning to your husband's bedside.  You will have the sad
consolation of seeing him, while I..."

She broke down and sobbed, and the sympathetic Adelaide administered
red lavender on sugar, while her maid kept guard on the landing to
intercept Madame Tessier should she appear.  The cock-and-bull story
told the girl would hardly have borne the test of recital before a
third person.  But Juliette was young, and innocent and unsuspecting,
and Adelaide was experienced in the ways of the world, and very old
in guile....

"Courage, my child, and above all, have faith in Heaven!"  It did not
at all suit her voluptuous type, the heroic-pious tone....
"Naturally you will, knowing M. le Colonel a prisoner, leave nothing
undone to assuage the miseries of his situation!...  Have I guessed
right?  I venture to think I have!"  She patted Juliette's hand and
smiled in the drowned blue eyes, from which she gently drew the
little soaked handkerchief.  "Accompanied by your venerable
protectress, you will instantly return to France.  You will leave no
stone unturned to obtain an interview with the Emperor--you will
implore him on your knees to obtain M. le Colonel's exchange....
Presto! the Emperor will set the machinery in motion.  He will give
back three Officers to the King of Prussia--and Mademoiselle will
have her father again!  Is it not so, tell me, my little one?"

She held the girl's small hands in hers, and as she marked off each
item of her program, she gently clapped the hands together, as in
approval or consent.  It was a characteristic trick with Adelaide
when she meant to be playfully coaxing, and there was imprudence in
employing it now.  But with the first inchoate stirring of memory in
Juliette, caution reawakened in Madame de Bayard.  She released the
hands, and said in a graver tone:

"Your _gouvernante_ will not object to return?"

Juliette responded:

"Dear Madame, that lady is not my instructress.  She is the excellent
Madame Tessier, my grandmother's oldest friend."

Adelaide's lip wore the expression of one who sniffs at physic.  Had
she not been deafened with the recounted virtues of this very Madame
Tessier!  As she racked her memory for the date of a possible
meeting, Juliette continued:

"She is very kind to me.  But I fear she will not consent to return
to France immediately.  She is now upon her way to Mons-sur-Trouille
to attend the wedding of her only son.  All has been arranged.  It is
to take place upon the 22d."

A sigh heaved her breast, and her eyelids sank under the burning gaze
of Adelaide.  But Adelaide was still engaged with Madame Tessier:

"_If she has seen me once--and it may well be once!--she certainly
has forgotten me!_" she commented mentally.  Aloud she said:

"But you, Mademoiselle--you are free to return to our beloved
country.  Under my own guardianship if you will.  Do not refuse!...
Grant me the privilege!"

Juliette panted:

"Oh, if I might accept!...  But this marriage is the obstacle!
Because M. Tessier could not return to France for it, my father
commanded that I should go.  All the more urgently that War had been
declared with Prussia, and the regiment had been ordered to join the
Imperial Army at Metz."

Madame Adelaide repeated scoffingly:

"This marriage ... this marriage....  Is your presence necessary to
legalize the ceremony?"

Juliette cried, opening wide her eyes:

"Alas! yes, Madame!--for I am to be the bride!..."

A shock visibly passed through the nerves of the woman who heard her.
She started in her chair and grew livid underneath her powder and
rouge.  And the dusky marks on her fair skin started into sinister
prominence.  She was suddenly terrible, and haggard and old....

"So, that was de Bayard's plot....  To marry her!" Adelaide heard an
inward voice saying.  "Why did you not foresee that, knowing her of
age?  Nineteen--though she looks like a child, almost....  Her
grandmother possessed that physique of an infant, in combination with
an iron determination, and a regard of truth that robbed Life of
every alleviation, deprived conversation of grace and
versatility--reduced the very language of Love to the level of a
notary's _précis_...."

All this passed through her brain in an instant.  She controlled
herself, rose, took the girl's hands again, and kissed her on the
brow, saying with sorrowful melodiousness:

"My child, I comprehend!  But while I rejoice at the happiness that
awaits the daughter, I weep--forgive me that I weep!--for the father
in his prison-cell.  He is handsome, thy betrothed--and brave--and
not a soldier?  In a day like this when our France cries out for men?"

Juliette clenched her little hands as the languid irony stabbed her.
She cried out, almost beside herself:

"Oh, that is what I feel, and for that I cannot pardon him!  Why is
he not a soldier?  One could esteem him if he were!  But oh!
Madame,--I despise him, and that makes it the more terrible....  This
marriage with a husband whom I have never even seen!"

"_Ah, ha!..._" she heard a strange voice scream through peals of
laughter.  "Ah, _la, la!_--what a clumsy game to play!...  _Fi donc,
M. le Colonel!_...  So we were to be married in the style of the Old
Commander....  '_Pas files a droite!_...  To the church, quick
march!'  _Mon Dieu!  Mon Dieu!_ how droll!..."

She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, and said, controlling her
frantic merriment:

"Sweet child, forgive me, I am a little hysterical....  The shock of
Victor's wound ... my sympathy with your cruel situation....  How
could M. le Colonel subject you to a trial so severe?"  Feeling
herself upon unsafe ground, she dried her eyes again and amended.
"That, I comprehend, is a question between yourselves....  When this
wedding was arranged M. le Colonel had no comprehension of what would
befall him.  Yet, for his sake, would it not be wise to delay?
Engage the interest of the Emperor before it is too late to reach the
beloved captive.  Should he be interned in some fortress of East
Prussia, how will even a daughter's tenderness reach him amidst those
desolate plains--in those caverns of freezing stone!..."

She used her fine voice like a consummate artist of the theater....
Juliette had a vision of her father dying, fettered, ghastly and
gaunt with famine, as an engraving of Count Ugolino in his dungeon
she remembered to have somewhere seen....  And her secret horror of
Charles Tessier, wedded with the feverish longing to return to France
and work for the release of her dear prisoner, prompted her to
decision now....

"I will go with you, since you are good enough to propose it.  But
Madame Tessier will never give her consent.  Therefore, we must leave
here without consulting her, and secretly....  I will write a letter
explaining all.  Money I have for the railway charges, not much, but
I think sufficient!"

Said Adelaide, barely able to hide her triumph:

"Leave the purchase of the tickets to me, _ma mignonne_!  I have a
pretty little score to settle with M. le Colonel.  We will settle our
accounts presently, I promise you!  What is the matter now?"

Juliette gasped:

"Alas!--I have no passport!  At least, Madame Tessier has both
ours...."

"Ah, bah!" said Adelaide.  "We will borrow Mariette's....  She can
remain here at pasture, and amuse herself with the waiters!..."  She
burst out laughing at Juliette's look of astonishment, and tapped her
under the chin, telling her to go to her room, pack a small hand-bag
with necessary articles, change into a dark, plain walking-dress, and
rejoin her as soon as might be.  She showed a small watch, its back
thickly crusted with emeralds, saying:

"Hurry!...  You have barely a quarter of an hour."

Then she opened the door, sped her capture with a beaming smile,
beckoned Mariette, and this strange colloquy took place between Circe
and her tirewoman:

"Did the old woman come nosing upstairs after the little Mademoiselle
joined me?"

Mariette replied:

"She did, Madame, but I had locked both Mademoiselle's doors--that
leading into the old lady's room, and the one that opens on the
corridor,--and put the keys in my pocket.  Here they are!"

She held them up, her sallow features expressive with the expectation
of a reward earned by intelligence.  Said Adelaide, impatiently
tapping her handsome foot:

"And then?...  And then?..."

"Then I accidentally encountered Madame on the threshold of
Mademoiselle's apartment.  Seeing her about to knock, I told her that
I had seen the young lady descend the stairs, carrying a letter,
which I supposed Mademoiselle intended to post at the pillar in the
vestibule....  Hearing this the old lady thanked me, and bundled
downstairs.  She is asthmatic, judging by her wheezing....  She will
wait a bit before she climbs up all these flights again."

Adelaide thought a moment, and then gave orders.

"Run you down, hunt up the old woman--help her to search everywhere
for the little thing--you understand!...  Half an hour will be
sufficient to detain her below stairs.  In less time Mademoiselle
will be safe with me in my apartment....  Then you will give Madame
these keys and a little note written by Mademoiselle....  Or--do you
know of a waiter who would undertake to do this and hold his tongue?"

Mariette's expression became sentimental.  She said, with her head
tilted on one side:

"There is one, a Swiss youth, handsome and with the form of an
athlete, upon whose fidelity and silence Madame can implicitly
rely...."

"For how much?" Adelaide demanded, having no illusions as to the
permanence of an unpurchased silence.

Mariette answered:

"I will guarantee Adolphe Madame's for the sum of twenty francs!"

Adelaide gave her a bank-note, and the faithful creature tripped away
to split it.  Despite youth, beauty and muscles, her Adolphe only got
ten francs.  But he carried out his instructions and handed Madame
Tessier the keys, with a little envelope, containing a hasty line in
the handwriting of Juliette:


"_Dearest Madame,_" it said.  "_This moment I have received grave
news of my father, compelling me to leave your side.  This marriage
must be deferred.  Entreat M. Charles to excuse me!  I embrace and
pray you to pardon._

  "J. M. De B."


The little note was penned on the corner of Adelaide's
toilette-table.  While Madame read it and fainted,--was revived by
Mariette and the athletic Adolphe,--scolded herself into hysterics,
came out of them and dispatched telegrams; tore the telegrams up and
wrote letters,--Juliette was safely hidden in Madame Adelaide's room.

Later on, when Madame Tessier had left the hotel, with her luggage
and the trunks and bandboxes of the vanished bride-elect--this time
containing the marriage robe, crown and so on,--Madame de Baye sent
for her bill and paid it--ordered a _fiacre_ and drove to the
station, accompanied by her maid, and her maid's sister, a demure
little person in black merino, cut convent-style, whose head was
draped, after the fashion of some lay novices, with a black silk veil.


The abduction was effected in the simplest fashion....  Not a soul
turned to look at the dowdy little figure carrying the hand-bag, its
slight proportions half hidden in the sweeping folds of Adelaide's
silken train.

The station was crowded with newly-arrived French officers, men of
MacMahon's defeated army, who wore their swords, having given their
_parole_ to their captors not to serve again in the War.  Belgian
officers fraternized with them,--Belgian ladies of the Red Cross were
busily engaged in making much of those who were wounded....
Juliette's heart swelled at the sight of the bandages and crutches,
and when the laden stretchers were carried past, the hot tears
streamed down her white cheeks behind her screening veil.

The train carried a great many French passengers, as well as an
English Red Cross column and a Belgian one.  When the engine
shrieked, Juliette started as guiltily as though it had been the
voice of Madame Tessier, shrilly lamenting an absconding
daughter-in-law.

They were off--launched upon the iron road that led back to France
and freedom.  The excellent Mariette remained behind.  She would
sleep at some hotel, procure a passport, and join her mistress later.
Madame de Baye took the trouble to explain.

From the shrinking little figure in the corner of the carriage came a
muffled sound in answer.

"Let her mope," Adelaide said to herself.  "Thought is necessary to
carry out my plan!"

You are to see her as Juliette saw her, leaning her fair round elbow
on the padded window-ledge, and thinking, as the rolling plains in
the vicinity of Brussels gradually gave place to valley and hill.
All of fierce and sensual and treacherous that mingled in her complex
nature with how many nobler qualities,--showed now in the beautiful
mask of Adelaide, even as she sat brooding there.

She had knotty problems to decide, it must be admitted....  How best
to play this marvelous trump, her daughter thrown in her way by
chance, was one of these.  That plot of Straz, for bringing the girl
into contact with the Heir Imperial, might be combined with
Adelaide's own original notion of employing the girl's influence to
bring about a reconciliation with M. de Bayard.

The indifference of M. de Bismarck had quashed her tentative
approaches on the one subject.  The silent contempt of de Bayard had
thrown the other affair out of gear.  To score off both would be
magnificent....  As for Straz ... she lost grip of herself when she
thought of the Roumanian, murmuring:

"For revenge on him, who has robbed me of my beauty, how cheerfully I
would give my soul!"

Juliette, from her corner, saw the change and shuddered.  Adelaide
turned sharply, to read terror in the girl's face.

"What is it, my chicken?  Has anything frightened you?" ...

The terrifying Medusa turned to a maternally-smiling Cybele.  She
leaned across the intervening space of cushion, to playfully pat the
knee of her charge.  But the answering smile was as faint as the
scent of frozen violets....  The spell of her beauty had been broken
when her demon had looked out of her eyes.

"My nerves are not as strong as they were before--what happened in
July," she told herself.  "And that is another debt I owe to Nicolas.
He would be wiser to let me forget him--if oblivion be possible."

Her looking-glass bore out each day what the Roumanian had said to
her.  "_Never will you be able to look in your mirror without
remembering me!_"

And to keep her smart alive, the Slav had adopted a method of his own
invention.  Peculiarly ingenious and characteristic of Straz.

At intervals Adelaide received anonymous letters, containing
inclosures, wherever she went and by whatever alias she passed.
Envelopes directed in varying hands would contain doll's mirrors
costing but a sou or two.  Pinchbeck-framed ovals or circles of tin
or glass, always reflecting the same thing.

A livid face of hate, streaked with those faint brownish red marks
left by the tightened folds of the silk scarf that had so nearly
strangled her.  She had tried to laugh at this childish form assumed
by the malice of the Roumanian.  But the deadly cleverness of the
thing lay in the fact--that it did what it was meant to do.  The
medieval torture of the falling drops of water was equaled by this
Ordeal of the Penny Looking-Glass.

"_Look, see, and think of me!_" sometimes ran the doggerel rhyme
scrawled on the paper wrapping of the doll's mirror.  At other times:

"_Charms that are spoiled hold no men entoiled!_" would be the motto,
or something equally stupid, dull and banal.  The stupidity was
becoming unbearable by its very repetition; by the certainty and
regularity with which the laden envelopes arrived.  Sometimes
Adelaide felt entangled in a cunningly woven network ... surrounded
by spies, sleepless and unseen....  Yet in the maid Mariette the Slav
had found an accomplice clever enough to carry out his purposes
single-handed.  The cream of the thing was--Adelaide never suspected
Mariette.

Treacherous herself, she believed in the devotion of this woman, who
watched her anguish grimly, planting fresh thorns in her mistress's
shuddering flesh.  And every day or so brought another doll's
looking-glass.  The jeer that accompanied the last had been a vilely
parodied verse of the child's dancing-song:

  "_Ma commère était belle!
  Helas! dans le temps!
  Ma commère était belle!
  Helas! dans le temps!  Hélas!
  Pousser un soupir!
  A vue de ma commère:
  L'Amour n'a qu'à mourir!
      Hélas!_"


One may imagine the curl of Adelaide's lip on reading rubbish like
this.  But she read it more than once, and when she finally burned
it, the accursed jingle, burr-like, stuck in her memory: for she it
was who had been beautiful in the time that had passed for
evermore--the gossip at the first sight of whose damaged, unveiled
charms Love sighed and gave up the ghost.




LII

Meanwhile Juliette, nestled in her corner, stared from the window as
Belgium hurried by.  Bouillon, at whose station they left the train,
showed a platform crowded with swaggering Prussian officers of the
Crown Prince's army--some of them wounded, all upon _parole_.  French
ladies, entering and leaving the carriages, looked daggers at their
enemies.  Poisoned daggers at Adelaide, who, to her secret annoyance,
was recognized and familiarly greeted by two of these Teutonic
warriors, one a tall and red-whiskered Bavarian Light Dragoon, the
other a brown-coated Hussar of von Barnekow's Brigade.

In vain Adelaide ignored the pair and redoubled the directions she
was giving to a porter.  The Bavarian coolly thrust the man aside,
opened the carriage-door and jumped upon the steps.

"_Meine gnädigste_ ... loveliest Countess, you won't give the go-by
to your old comrade Otto?  Here also is von Wissman, who claims a
greeting from you!"

There was no gainsaying the boisterous good-fellowship of the
officers.  They superintended the removal of the luggage from the
van, engaged a pair-horsed _fiacre_, and advised as to its loading.
When Adelaide and her charge entered they followed uninvited, and
deposited themselves on the front seat, incommoding the ladies with
their long spurred boots and filling the vehicle with the odor of
cigars and wine.  Both talked much; the Hussar chattered incessantly;
giving details of the various actions he had been engaged in, the
chance by which he had been taken prisoner, the irksomeness of being
interned in Belgium until the ending of hostilities:

"Not that it will be long before the War is over.  We now hold Alsace
Lorraine and the country north and east of Metz.  The Crown Prince is
making for Châlons; that will give the French Emperor an attack of
hysterics.  He has handed over the supreme command to Bazaine, and
yesterday left Gravelotte for Verdun.  That means Châlons, and after
Châlons will be Paris.  Badinguet has had enough of campaigning to
last him the rest of his reign."

Adelaide asked:

"And the Prince?"

The brown Hussar puffed out his cheeks and squinted like a
pantomime-mask.  The Bavarian replied:

"Lulu went with papa, though we heard they had trouble to make him.
He wanted to stop and kill Prussians--they're such horrible beasts,
you know!"

"You droll beggar, Strelitz, shut up with your mummery," said the
Hussar, leaning across him to pitch his cigar-butt away.

"Madame is fire-proof, why waste the stump of a three-mark Havana?"
chuckled Strelitz, keeping his own weed alight.  He went on, drolling
for the benefit of his companion:

"This meeting, loveliest Countess, makes me feel a youth
again--garlanding the grim temples of Bellona with the roses of the
goddess of Love.  You remember the classical lessons you used to give
me only last winter, in your charming flat near the Linden Strasse?"

He ogled Adelaide with comic sentimentality:

"And the jovial supper-party at which I was present, when von Kessel,
of the Guards Infantry, had the presumption to bring an uninvited
guest!"

"Why apologize!" laughed the Hussar.  "The pleasantest
acquaintanceships are made by chance!"

"Ah, but this was not chance!" said the Bavarian, with mock
solemnity.  "It was one of those accidents that only happen by
design.  Von Schön-Valverden bored von Kessel frightfully to take
him--left the fat fellow no peace until he gave in.  The Count is
reported to have paid the penalty."

"Aha!  I can imagine what happened to the youngster!" giggled the
Hussar.

Replied the comedian:

"He had three losses that evening.  Each one more serious than the
last!"

Adelaide shrugged, but she did not look angry; indeed, through her
veil her disdainful beauty assumed a smiling cast.

"Three losses," the comedian repeated, "exactly as in my own case.
For he first lost his money--so did I!--we were playing baccarat that
evening--then he lost his head, and finally his heart!"

"Otto, thou wert always a tease!" protested Madame, but her ill-humor
had softened into conscious coquetry, and her eyes beamed radiantly
through the flowers of her masking veil.

"Or he would have!" continued Otto: "had not his mother, the
Countess, come flying to the rescue and carried him off, nobody knows
where!..."

Adelaide's eyes blazed.  She said in a tone of haughty nonchalance:

"Count Valverden is now with the first Army, advancing toward
Metz....  He says he hopes to win the silver sword-knot before the
close of the campaign."

"You correspond?" the Hussar asked, grinning, as the driver signified
impatience by kicking the back of the box-seat.  Both officers got
out of the carriage as Adelaide answered coldly:

"He often writes to me."

The driver, ignored, opened a little padded trap-hole in the front
part of the vehicle.  He clapped his mouth to it and shouted in the
Flemish tongue:

"_Geef my U address!_"

Adelaide gave the name of the Hôtel des Postes.  The officers kissed
her hand and said they would call there on the morrow.  They waved as
the _fiacre_ rumbled out of the station.  Adelaide waved back, and
issued quite another direction through the driver's trap-hole.  And
the _fiacre_ went jingling through the old-world streets of the
castled town that sits on the broad flowing river whose bridge was
crowded with French and Belgian officers, chatting, smoking and
discussing the news of the War.

Presently they were free of the streets, roaring with the tongues of
many nations, choked with trains of French wounded, Red Cross
columns, Sisters, surgeons, bearers, carriages full of visitors, and
more processions of officers on _parole_.  The _fiacre_ lumbered at a
good pace behind its pair of heavy-hocked Flemish horses along a
wide, straight road, with plains on either side.  And presently tall
black wooden observation-towers marked the frontier where Belgian
videttes and outposts amicably fraternized with French.

Kilometer posts of wood instead of stone....  The dear French
language in the mouths of people.  Breasting hills covered with
woods, instead of fallow plains, intersected with level roads
bordered with eternal poplar-trees.

With the joy and relief of the return, Juliette's heavy heart grew
lighter.  Her muscles relaxed.  She could unclench her hands again.
For the horror she had felt at the contiguity of the German officers
and the loathing their familiar address had inspired in her had been
well-nigh unbearable, though she understood their language but
imperfectly.  And this strange woman, her self-chosen protectress,
who greedily fed on an admiration so coarse, Who was she?  What was
she?  The poor girl shuddered as she wondered.  Of women like
Adelaide she had no experience, and yet she could not silence the
voice of her doubt.

When Madame good-humoredly bade her unlock traveling bags, unstrap
baskets and serve both with the food and drink she had lavishly
provided, Juliette, declining all offers of refreshment, waited upon
her, in silence so frozen that the patience of her protectress was
severely taxed.

Unaided, Madame emptied a pint bottle of champagne, a fluid which
temporarily elevates the spirits, and consumed the greater part of a
cold _pâté_, with pastry and fruit, winding up the repast with a
Turkish cigarette and a thimbleful of cognac from the silver flask in
her traveling-bag.

"How dull you are--how cold, you tiny creature!" she grumbled.  "Is
it blood that runs in your veins, or melted snow?  From whom do you
inherit this torpid nature--without vivacity, warmth, or gaiety?
Your father was not lacking in fire and passion....  Your mother----"
Her long eyes laughed wickedly.  "A feminine volcano, shall we say?"

A shock went through the girl.  She visibly quailed and shuddered.
Through the rumbling of the _fiacre_, she heard herself speaking in a
voice she hardly recognized:

"My mother....  Did you know my mother?  And--knowing her--dare you
speak of her to me?..."

"Dare!..."  Adelaide threw back her handsome head in a gale of
laughter, curling back her crimson lips, lavishly displaying her
splendid teeth.  "I dare do many things," she said, still laughing.
"Conventionality ... timidity ... these are not characteristics
distinctive of me!  Nor were they ever, to do myself justice....  Why
are we stopping at this miserable place?"

Juliette, rendered dumb by growing fear of her companion, did not
answer.  The carriage drew up at a crossroads where a bridge arched
the Givonne.  They were upon the fringes of the village, near a
country inn and posting-house.  The driver had an ancient
understanding with the proprietor of this hostelry that his beasts
should break down here.

He now got down from his perch.  Adelaide lowered the window.  The
man explained by the aid of signs that the horses were quite
exhausted and they were yet three miles from Sedan.  The proprietor
of the inn assisted at the colloquy, extending the distance by
another mile--hinting at possible dangers after nightfall.  He could
supply an excellent supper, a comfortable double bedroom--coffee at
the peep of day, a vehicle and horses to take Madame and Mademoiselle
to Sedan, or wherever they chose....

Finally the driver was paid enough to satisfy even his cupidity.
Madame's luggage was taken upstairs, the ladies mounted to their room.

It was a low-ceiled, dampish apartment containing two bedsteads of
uncomfortable aspect, with flock beds and dusty chintz draperies.
Candles were lighted, put on the chimney-piece....  A fire of damp
billets was set smoking by the efforts of the chambermaid, who was
not disinclined to talk.  French troops were encamped near.  Let the
ladies look from the window.  Those lines of red and yellow lights
glaring through a rising fog marked the sites of the soldiers'
watch-fires.  There were officers down below drinking wine and
playing cards in the _salle à manger_.  Also soldiers were drinking
cider in the yard.  It made one feel more safe, the presence of so
many warriors.  Indeed, Sedan was full of them, and all the country
round about....  At Metz also, even more, with guns enough to kill
all the Prussians in existence.  The chambermaid felt confident that
they would soon be driven out of France.

Still talking, she supplied hot water, and laid a little
supper-table, the ladies preferring not to descend.  A smoked
omelette with herbs, some stewed pears, and a seed-cake furnished the
supper, with a decanter of thin red wine.

Adelaide nibbled and sipped discontentedly.  Juliette, being
famished, made a meal.  The billets refusing warmth Madame unrobed
her sumptuous person, arrayed herself in lace and lawn, enlisting the
services of her charge as lady's maid, and gracefully betook herself
to bed.  There she leaned on her white elbow, chatting while Juliette
made her own preparations for the down-lying....  Her tigerish mood
was past.  She was amiable--almost affectionate....  She even praised
the girlish charms reluctantly unveiled in the process of undressing;
remarking:

"After all, you only want style and more _tournure_ to do execution
among the men.  Some of them actually prefer coldness.  They say it
gives the illusion of innocence.  Have you locked the door?  Yes!
Then double-lock and drag a trunk before it, and shut the window and
slide the bolt....  Pull down the blind and draw the curtain....  One
cannot be too careful in places like these!..."

"But we shall be suffocated!" Juliette cried in consternation,
forgetting her deadly fear of Adelaide in her craving for fresh air.
And then in the ghastly face the other turned upon her, she saw the
unmistakable stamp of Fear.

"What have I said?...  What has frightened you?  Are you ill?  Pray
tell me!" she begged.

But Adelaide waved her off, biting her pale lips to bring the blood
back to them, saying harshly: "It is nothing!  A spasm.  I have
suffered from them of late....  Do not stare at me as though I were
hideous.  Give me my reticule....  There! on the toilette-table.  How
clumsy you tiny things can be!..."

Trembling, Juliette handed her the gold-mounted bauble.  She took a
little phial from it and a measuring-glass.

"Now place one of those candles on the night-stand, beside me.  One
will not do--give me both!..."

There was laudanum in the little crystal phial.  When Adelaide had
measured and swallowed her dose she breathed more easily, stared less
fixedly, and those disfiguring reddish-purple streaks of Straz's
handiwork showed less vividly against the creamy skin.  Her suffused
eyes regained clearness.  She lay back among her pillows and declared
herself better ... laughed at the terror still visible in Juliette's
face....

"Now give me the little pistol and the pearl-handled dagger out of
the inner compartment in my traveling-bag....  The large, deep pocket
that fastens with a snap.  What! you would rather not!...  You do not
like to handle them....  _Fi donc_, Mademoiselle!  A soldier's
daughter--and guilty of such cowardice!..."

Juliette winced at the thrust.  It was her turn to bite her lips.
She steadied them and mastered her voice sufficiently to say:

"I dislike to touch such weapons, because I have never learned to use
them.  And I will ask you, Madame, not to speak jestingly of my
father to me!"

"Give me the pistol and stiletto, then!" stipulated her tormentress.

In silence Juliette took one of the candles, and set it near the
traveling-bag upon the table near the supper-tray which the
chambermaid had neglected to remove.  She dived into the deep pocket
as directed, and drew out a double-barreled pistol, mounted in ebony
and silver, and the dagger, a costly toy of Indian workmanship.
Something else fell upon the floor with a faint tinkle.  It was a
miniature set with pearls, that had rolled under the table.  She laid
the pistol and dagger there, took the candlestick and stooped to pick
the miniature up.  The portrait within the oval of pearls and gold
was that of a girl-child of some five years.  In the pictured face
that smiled up at her with eyes as deeply blue as the spring skies of
Italy, Juliette with a thrill and shock indescribable, recognized
herself....


"_It was the August of 1856.  Thou hadst five years, and thy curls
were as soft and yellow as chicken-down....  Thy mother used to say:
'Juliette will never be black like me!_'"


The beloved voice was in her ears, with the very throb of his aching
heart in it.  De Bayard's daughter knelt so long upon the floor,
motionless, staring at the horror, that Adelaide accused her
jestingly of having fallen asleep.

"Get up!  Wake!  Give me my pistol and the dagger.  I call them my
babies--they sleep under my pillow ever since--never mind!...  Ah!
You have blown out the candle....  Light it at this one!--or perhaps
you will have light enough without it?...  Ugh! how cold your hand
is, you chilly little frog!"

Juliette had blown out the candle so that she might unseen return the
portrait to the dressing-bag.  Had Straz's Sultana not been heavy
with laudanum, she would have perceived this.

Now she yawned, stretched, smiled, declared herself actually sleepy,
in spite of a mattress apparently stuffed with potatoes and stones....

Juliette was kneeling by the other bedside, a slender, rigid little
figure in a white night-robe, striving to collect her whirling
thoughts sufficiently to say her prayers.  When she rose up, Adelaide
asked her drowsily:

"Do you pray always?...  And what do you pray for?  And for whom,
tell me, you secret little thing!"

The low answer came:

"I pray for the living, Madame, and for the departed....  For my
father and--others who are dear to me; for myself and for my
grandmother's soul!"

"For your mother?" Adelaide queried curiously.

"I pray that my mother may repent and be forgiven!"

"Ah-h!"  Adelaide's inflection was sleepily scornful.  "So you think
her a terrible sinner, eh, Mademoiselle?"

The white-robed figure palpably shuddered, yet the answer came
unfalteringly:

"It is not for me to judge--you, Madame!"

The clean riposte pierced the consciousness that had been dulled by
the opiate.  There was a dreadful silence, during which the girl
could hear her own heart drumming, and through the noise it made, the
hiss of her mother's sharply intaken and expelled breath.  Then
Adelaide shrugged, saying in a tone of drowsy irony:

"That is the most sensible utterance I have yet heard from you, ma
mignonne.  Well--the discovery was inevitable!  Now, with your leave,
I am going to sleep!..."

And she did, while the girl sat huddled among her scanty bedclothes,
clasping her knees and praying for day.  Torn between unconquerable
aversion toward this bold, audacious, worldly woman, and the old
yearning toward the beautiful lost mother, enshrined as a
demi-goddess in a young child's recollection, you may imagine
Juliette's mental and physical plight.

That one should shudder at the touch of her who stood in so sacred a
relation was inconceivable....  That one should welcome it was
inconceivable also.  Dim conjectures as to her mother's past, as to
her present mode of life, were evolved from the depths of the
daughter's Convent-bred ignorance....  Would those German officers
have looked so boldly, conversed so coarsely and familiarly, if they
had not had reason to believe such approaches welcome, even
agreeable?...  The lives of Phryne, Thaïs and Aspasia were missing
from the pages of Juliette's School Dictionary of Classical
Biography.  Yet when Cora Pearl had flashed past her in the Bois, or
upon the Champs Élysées, driving four mouse-colored ponies in silver
harness--wielding a jeweled parasol driving-whip--she had
instinctively averted her gaze from the face of the courtesan.

Was Juliette's mother a woman like that woman?  And why, within a few
hours from their chance, accidental meeting, had she inveigled her
daughter into a snare?...  For that some sinister purpose had
prompted the proceeding began to be clear to the poor young girl.


Love....  Oh, Heaven! was the look in those hard eyes born of the
divine tenderness that a mother feels for her child?  Was it not
hatred that glittered from them?  Was it not revenge that had
concocted the plot?

The marriage with M. Charles Tessier, so keenly desired by the
Colonel, had been quashed by his wife's kite-like swoop upon the
bride.  Was that story of de Bayard's having been made prisoner by
Prussians true or invented?  If false, whither were they now
bound?...  "Oh, help, Mother of Mercy, Mary most pitiful!  Pray for
me that light may be given me!--teach me what I ought to do!..."

Growing calmer the reflection occurred to Juliette that this mother
so strangely encountered could not be all untender toward her
daughter, or the pearl-set miniature would not have been kept....
This brought tears to her aching eyes, and some relief to her
apprehensions.  She determined, remembering that token of lingering
kindness, that she would yield duty and obedience to her mother now.
Until she found her all untrustworthy, she would trust her....  She
had invented freely, in setting her springes--and yet not altogether
lied....


Sleep did not come to Mademoiselle de Bayard that night, or for many
nights after.  She lay staring at the curtains that met across the
blinded window, until the dawn edged them with a line of glimmering
gray.  As the streak encroached, she rose noiselessly, and silently
as the dawn itself approached her mother's bed.

Adelaide lay upon her back with her head thrown back amid its wealth
of rich black tresses, her arms tossed out and upward, the hands
clenched, one knee a little raised.  The unfastened robe of lawn
disclosed the creamy beauty of her throat and the swelling contours
of her magnificent bosom.  The sight sent an exquisite pang to the
heart of her sorrowful child.  Oh, God! if beauty so divine had been
but chaste, what pride, what happiness to call this woman mother!  To
lay one's head upon that breast and weep all griefs out there!...

The sleeper stirred beneath the wistful gaze of her daughter.  Violet
shadows were round her sealed eyelids and about her nostrils and
mouth.  She moaned a little and murmured brokenly:

"Nicolas ... Monseigneur ... insult ... never pardon!...  '_Only a
woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy...._'  Ah, _mon
Dieu!_..."

She cried out, and her eyes opened, staring about wildly.  She asked
suspiciously as they fell on Juliette:

"Have I been talking?...  What was I saying?"

Juliette answered simply and literally:

"That only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy."




LIII

They broke their fast on rolls and coffee, dressed and demanded, with
the bill, the promised carriage.  This was not so quickly forthcoming
as the landlord of the _Coup d'Épée_ had prophesied.  Indeed, the
debilitated conveyance of the wagonette type, drawn by one promoted
cart-horse, could only be had by grace of the traveler by whom it had
been previously engaged.  He proved, when Adelaide swept her charge
downstairs, to be a _Monsieur Anglais_, traveling for pleasure.  A
middle-sized, clean-shaven, inconspicuous, elderly man, in an
ill-fitting suit of drab-color.  He sported a sealskin vest in spite
of the oppressive heat of the weather, and spoke the French of the
conversation-manual with the accent it inculcates.  His baldish
grizzled head was covered with a straw hat bound with a preposterous
light-blue ribbon.  His luggage consisted of a brown calfskin bag, a
portable easel, sketching-block and color-box, and a violin-case, of
which articles he took the most excessive care.  Nothing could well
be more respectable, or appear more harmless.  Juliette breathed more
freely at the sight of the elderly drab-clothed man.

He professed himself happy to accommodate the ladies with a share in
the wagonette as far as Bazeilles, where he meant to take train for
Verdun.  Interpreting for Adelaide, who possessed no English,
Juliette learned that their own destination was not Metz, but Châlons.

That drive to Bazeilles in the freshness of the morning would have
been delightful under other circumstances.  The night-mists yet hung
white as milk over the valleys, while the breasting rises crowned
with woodlands were golden in the sun.  Tents of French brigades
snowed over the countryside.  Bugles and trumpets sometimes drowned
the rushing of the Givonne, beside whose stream their road conducted
them.  The stubbles were full of grain-devouring wood-pigeons, too
heavy even to rise and take wing when peasant-lads threw stones.  The
drab Englishman praised the view in the set terms of the manual,
until discovering that Mademoiselle had command of the tongue of
Albion, he reverted to that language with evident relief.

"For I won't deny it comes easier, though I manage to get on with the
other when necessary.  And since I left England--seven months ago--my
poor health requiring a holiday from business--it has been necessary
most of the time."

"Ask the hideous animal in the ugly clothes whether he has seen a
newspaper this morning," instructed Madame.  "And find out if he
knows anything of the movements of the Emperor.  Those miserables at
the inn were absolutely ignorant, or else they would not tell!"

The drab English traveler had reason to know something of his
Imperial Majesty, having recently encountered him with his suite at
the village of Gravelotte, eight miles from Metz.  He explained in a
rambling manner, and with many divagations, that he himself had been
surprised by the intrusion of War at the outset of a sketching-tour
in the northwest of France, which was to have realized the ambition
of his life.

"Painting from Nature and playing on the violin....  Those are what I
may call my weaknesses," he told the ladies by-and-by.

He was moist-eyed and red-nosed and shaky-handed, which must have
interfered with his brush-work and bowing.  An odor of strong waters
exhaled from his person and clothes.  You, had you been there, could
have imagined him making an inventory, serving a summons, or, mounted
on a Holborn auctioneer's rostrum--knocking down second-hand works of
inferior Art to imaginary bidders, and vaunting the qualities of
sticky-toned violins.  Save for his garrulity, he was inoffensive;
though his open conviction that his fellow-travelers were mother and
daughter caused Juliette infinite anguish and disquiet of mind.

"With regard to His Majesty the French Emperor, I was brought into
contact with him unexpectedly," said the drab man.  "You can picture
me, young lady, in the enjoyment of my well-earned holiday,
strolling, as one may say, from village to village, enjoying the
fresh air and the scenery, such a change after five-and-twenty years
of Camberwell, the Courts of Law, and Furnival's Inn."

Adelaide complained:

"He bores me horribly, this red-nosed imbecile!  Cannot he answer the
question?  What is he saying now?"

The drab man prattled on:

"For from the cradle, as one might say, I have been the vassal and
slave of Business, having been sent by my father to a Mercantile and
Legal Training College at Bromersham when only seven years old.  At
fifteen I was office-boy and under-clerk in the old gentleman's
office.  Believed in beginning at the bottom of the ladder, you see!
At eighteen, articled--again to the old gentleman!  He being a
solicitor and attorney with a good old-fashioned family practice, and
naturally being desirous to see his son a full-blown partner in the
Firm!..."

He sighed and shook his head sentimentally.

"No use to tell the old gentleman I had been born with other
ambitions.  That Art had a fascination, and the voice of Music
called....  I used up reams of office wove-note in making pen-and-ink
designs for illustrations to the books I'd read on the sly, and the
plays I'd seen on the quiet....  I'd render popular airs on the
mouth-organ to the admiration of all the other clerks.  'Now, Mr.
William, let's have a Musical Selection!' they'd say whenever the old
gentleman popped out....  I saved up my money to pay for a course of
tuition in Drawing from the Round and Life Model at a Night School of
Art in Soho.  But I never got time.  The old gentleman must have been
more knowing than I suspected, for he always managed to keep my nose
to the grindstone.  Will you believe that I bought this box, and this
easel, and the violin twenty years ago--and never got a chance to use
'em, until now?  To such a degree was my liberty hectored over, and
the talents that might have made me the center of a circle of
admirers, blighted by the Senior Partner and Head of the Firm...."

Adelaide, growing more restive, interrupted:

"Does this fatuous person who talks so greatly afford any
information, or does he not?"

"--Yet I could show you a sketch of the Roman Aqueduct at Ars that
would surprise you," went on the drab man, addressing Juliette,
"regarded as emanating from the pencil of a simple amatoor.  Also I
could touch off a French chansong on the violin in a style equally
creditable and gratifying--and justifying my retirement from Business
in the interests of Music and Art.  But----"

He took out a plaid silk handkerchief and wiped his moist eyes with
it, and wagged the grizzled head that wore the absurd blue-ribboned
straw hat in a maudlin, despondent way.

"But just as I'd settled to the roving life, tramping from inn to inn
and finding 'em comfortable, the country cooking tasty, and the
country vintages nice--War breaks out and spoils everything!  Another
week, and I should have bought a Bit of Ground!"

He mopped his eyes and snuffled a little, and put away the
handkerchief.

"It was going cheap--the Chatto and farm and wine-plant and
vineyards.  I had a good look at the title-deeds--everything was in
order there, even to a professional eye....  All I had to do was to
put down the money.  I'd have painted and fiddled, made wine and
drunk it--sold what I didn't drink, and branded the vintages:
'Château Musty, Dry, Sparkling ... Château Musty, Special Still.' ...
Château Musty, sweet, preferred by ladies....  Stop, though!  It
wouldn't have been that name!  My name is Furnival!  Excuse me,
Mam'selle, but I think your lady-mother is making some remark to you.
At least she impresses me with that idea."

"Madame is greatly desirous of intelligence with respect to the
Emperor," Juliette explained.  The talkative traveler looked
aggrieved:

"Pray tell the lady I am coming to him presently.  After the War
broke out--Lord! what a hurrying and scurrying of soldiers....
Bugles blowing your head off at four o'clock in the morning--all the
wagons taken to carry baggage--all the farm-horses whipped off to
drag cannon ... no more sensible business done anywhere!...  And when
the shooting began, it was a scandal!  Positively perilous to
visitors!  Why, I've been absolutely in danger of my life!..."

Adelaide's foot tapped impatiently on the floor of the wagonette.
Her fine eyes shot forth indignant sparks.  She bit her crimson lips.
The drab Englishman regarded her mildly, commenting:

"If I wasn't accustomed by this time to French ways and manners, I
should take it that your mamma had a temper of her own.  But it's the
national method of over-working the features....  Not that your
Emperor is given to too much expression.  Heavy, he struck me as, and
puffily low-spirited!  And even a worse sleeper than myself, if you
ask me!  For I spent the night in a room over His Majesty's, the
night he stopped in the inn at Gravelotte, and didn't shut my eyes
for an instant with his groanings and his moanings and his tramp ings
to and fro...."

He wagged his head, and pursued with solemnity:

"In the morning I peeped out of the window and saw him drive off.
All sorts of French Nobs bowing and scraping....  Orders and Stars
and shiny carriages, and silver-mounted harness on prancing bays....
Yet if he had asked me, I wouldn't have changed places.  Thinks I,
'How much better to be Me, plain William Furnival, an honest English
Commoner, than an Emperor whose crime-stained conscience keeps him
broad awake o' nights!'"

Said Juliette, her eyes blue fire, two angry roses in her usually
pale cheeks:

"But you, Monsieur--who also sleep badly--is that because you have
crime upon your soul?"

"What have you said to this creature that has frightened him?"
Adelaide demanded, as the drab traveler's jaw dropped, and his red
nose glowed brilliantly in a visage of dingy-white.

Juliette translated.  Said Madame, regarding the perturbed Mr.
Furnival, with a glance of superb indifference:

"He is a runaway husband of some Englishwoman who keeps a _pension_.
Or the absconding clerk of a London notary."


Whatever he may or may not have been, he fell silent after the little
passage here recorded.  At Bazeilles, where the driver was paid, and
the wagonette dismissed, though he entered the same train of vilely
dirty third-class carriages and goods-trucks, he traveled in a
compartment remote from that selected by his companions of the drive.

At Verdun they learned that the railway bridge below Metz had been
blown up by M. de Bazaine's Engineers, the line beyond being in
Prussian hands....  And at this point the drab gentleman got out,
hugging his violin-case, bag, and artist's fit-out.  Juliette saw him
swallowed up in a roaring crowd of mobilists from the Ardennes, who
rushed upon and instantly crammed solid every corner of the train.

A good-looking officer, entering with the deluge, apologized to the
ladies in a well-bred, easy way:

"It is inconvenient, Mesdames, but at the same time necessary....  I
take these little ones to Châlons to be incorporated in the New Army
of MacMahon....  They are rough, as you perceive, and very few are
yet in uniform.  But blue cloth and red cloth are less important than
chassepots, and they have them and can use them--these little ones of
mine!  And when they receive orders to march north and give a helping
hand to M. de Bazaine--I prophesy that, boots or no boots, they will
keep up with the best!"

Adelaide smiled witchingly on the speaker, plied the archery of her
fine eyes, evoking admiring glances from the officer and his uncouth,
half-clad, half-trained mobilists.  She said she had no doubt of the
courage of these sons of Western France.  She had heard, she added,
that the Emperor was at Châlons, but that H.I.M. intended to resort
to Paris, having surrendered to another the _bâton_ of supreme
command.

"'To Paris'!"  The officer shrugged.  "Alas! at such a crisis in the
affairs of the nation, Paris would be the last shelter for the French
Emperor.  It is no longer a secret that the Emperor has already left
Châlons with the Grand Headquarters Staff and the First Corps of the
Army of MacMahon....  Rheims is the destination--that intelligence is
also public property...."

"And the Prince?" Adelaide asked eagerly.

"Monseigneur the Prince Imperial left for Rheims with the Emperor,
but will be sent on from there to Rethel, with his carriages, and an
escort of Imperial Body Guards under Colonel Watrin.  His three
_aides-de-camp_, Colonel Lamey, Colonel Comte Clary, and Commandant
Duperré of the battleship _Le Taureau_, attend him.  Comte d'Aure is
equerry now instead of old Bachon!...  Pardon, Madame?...  You
descend here...?  But I thought you were traveling to Châlons!...
Permit me to open the carriage door!"

And the prattling officer, who had promised himself a charming
_vis-à-vis_ upon the journey, must needs leap out upon the platform,
arrest the guard's arm in the act of signaling the start....
Adelaide was handed down....  Juliette followed with an avalanche of
Madame's traveling bags and parcels ... a discontented porter was
called upon to rescue her trunks and _portmanteaux_ from the van....

The signal fell, the train steamed out of the station.  Juliette,
white and fagged, sitting on an up-piled luggage truck, was asked by
Adelaide:

"Where do you think we are going now, Mademoiselle?"

Came the weary answer:

"I do not know, Madame....  First, it was to Metz, and then to
Châlons.  Now, it may be to Rheims, as the Emperor is there."

Adelaide returned tormentingly:

"But we are not going to Rheims."

A thrill passed through Juliette.

"My father is not a prisoner, then?"

"My faith!" said Adelaide, shrugging with ostentatious indifference.
"He is as he was yesterday.  But all the same, my little one, we do
not go to Rheims, but to Rethel....  Tell me--you have brought with
you a walking-costume that is tolerable?  Something more becoming
than this lugubrious garment you have on!"

Juliette replied in the negative.  Adelaide's look was coldly
scornful as she scrutinized the little figure before her.  Could this
really be her daughter, this pale, peaked, elfish thing?...

What sloping shoulders, what tragic, haunted eyes, what a long upper
lip, what lack of vivacity and elegance....  Her grandmother--that
well-loathed woman, lived again in de Bayard's child.

Monseigneur the Prince Imperial must have curious taste in feminine
beauty to have been smitten with this stiff little white-faced
mannequin.  Whom de Bayard worshiped ... whom even Straz had
admired....  What were his words ... "_A little Queen of Diamonds,
fresh as a rosebud!_"  Grand Dieu!... how comical!  "_A rare
jewel....  A chic type....  A pocket edition of Psyche, before that
little affair with Cupid._"

Well, Cupid waited at Rethel....  Her red lips writhed with the
jeering laughter she stifled.  Two devils of mockery looked through
the windows of her eyes.  And with the swift understanding of this
stranger that came of their close, intimate relationship, Juliette
encountering that look, said mentally:

"She hates me!  My mother hates me!  For that reason she sought me
out and told me that false tale....  Because of that she lured me
away with her from Brussels!  Because of that she has planned to do
something....  Oh, my father, if only you knew!..."




LIV

The Hope of a tottering and crumbling Empire was installed at the
Prefecture of Rethel, a picturesque, old-world river-town of many
bridges, and houses with quaint carved gables, slanting floors, and
low ceilings crossed by heavy beams.

He had arrived late on the previous evening.  There had been no
flags, no bands, no popular ovation, no delirium of enthusiasm in
greeting the Imperial heir.  Press organs were now telling
incredulous Parisians that in consideration of the Prince's weariness
the people had foregone their privilege of welcome.  In honest truth,
the unlucky townsfolk were too sad and sick-hearted to cheer.

A great battle was impending in the neighborhood of Metz.  The First
and Second Armies of United Germany had crossed the Moselle, wheeled
right-about-face, and were closing in on Bazaine, who had failed in
his attempt to retire upon Châlons by the Verdun Road.  The Prussian
Crown Prince had come out of the Vosges, and was marching North
instead of moving upon Châlons.  If his vanguard clashed with
MacMahon's patched-up Army there would be trouble....  Everyone
expected trouble, the soil of France had been sown so thickly with
the bad seed from which great national disasters spring, even before
it had been plowed by German shells....  The coming tragedy chilled
and numbed as the iceberg chills the senses of the passenger in the
Atlantic liner's warm deck-cabin, long before the keel grates, and
the white fog lifts, and shows the towering Death on which the doomed
vessel is being hurled.

The deep dejection of the officers around the Heir Imperial could not
be covered by any well-meant attempts at disguise.  The rumors that
came through the fog into which Bazaine had vanished were horribly
disquieting.  They waited upon thorns, for a telegram from the
Emperor, conveying intelligence on which they might rely.

There was something in the situation of the lonely, proud young
creature they surrounded that made the heart bleed as you looked at
him.  So helpless and yet so representative of unfettered Power, so
ignorant in the ways of the world, and yet so conversant with its
outward forms and ceremonies, so palpably the last frail link upon a
chain that was being hacked through by the Prussian sword.

He had grown older and thinner since the days of July, and his fresh,
fine color had faded to paleness.  There was a frown upon the open
forehead now, the gay, confident regard had changed to sullenness.
The blue eyes were less lustrous.  The silky chestnut hair was
rumpled and duller.  Care had overshadowed the boyish head with her
heavy sable wing.

The arrival of the previous night had been sudden and unexpected, the
startled authorities had been rarely put about to find fitting
accommodation for their Emperor's son.  This morning Monseigneur had
been hurried out of his bed at the Prefecture to receive the
apologies of the Prefect, an Imperialistic vine-grower, who had been
absent in the interests of his affairs.

"Your Imperial Highness will be aware that this is a critical month
with owners of vineyards.  The vines have borne well and the grapes
are ripening magnificently.  Next month the champagne-making ought to
be in full progress.  But the lack of hands terribly hampers us....
Women cannot replace the men who are skilled in the various
processes.  And who knows----"

The Prefect broke off, for the Sub-Prefect had nudged him openly.
Even if the tide of War should turn, and France be freed from her
invaders, who knew whether any of those grape-pickers and sorters and
pressers, Reservists and volunteers and conscripts who had been
called out to carry the chassepot against the Prussians, would ever
return to their countryside again?  Who knew whether they would not
be thrown as ripe grapes into Death's huge wine-press?  Perhaps their
red blood was foaming in the vat even now.

Who knew whether those rich, prosperous vineyards on the Aisne would
not be trampled into sticky mashiness under the ruthless feet of
Prussian Army Corps?  If the rumors were correct, an advance upon
Paris might take place at any moment.  True, MacMahon's Army was said
to be covering the road to the capital.

But MacMahon had been already beaten terribly....  Recollecting it,
the Prefect shuddered in his well-polished shoes.

But he said his say and shook the young hand graciously offered him,
and got out of his own wife's drawing-room as awkwardly as though he
had been one of his own clerks.  While the Sub-Prefect, a
sharp-visaged little man, who combined the office of public notary
with the trade of wool-stapler, trotted after him, very much at his
ease.

"How you sweat!  Wipe your head and your neck too," counseled the
notary.  "Otherwise your cravat will be a perfect wisp and Madame
will certainly take you to task!"

"You have such _sangfroid_, my good M. Schlitte.  I envy you; I do,
positively!" stuttered the Prefect, puffing and blowing and mopping.
"Royalty invariably dazzles me....  I tremble ... I blunder....  In a
word, I make a fool of myself!  At this moment I am tortured by the
weight of my responsibilities....  True--His Highness is well
guarded--true, the Army of Châlons is somewhere or other in the
neighborhood!...  But the daring of these Prussian horsemen ... the
danger of a surprise!..."

"A surprise....  Nonsense, my dear sir.  The thing is impossible!"

And M. Schlitte, who was said upon the strength of his queer French
accent to be a native of Strasbourg, soothed the Prefect, and grinned
like a rat-trap as he betook himself home.  Inhabiting a riverside
villa in the neighborhood, from which residence--we may suppose for
the better conduct of his extensive business--a private telegraphic
installation connected him with Rheims, Paris, Brussels,
Luxembourg--and, when necessary, Berlin--it would have been possible
to have made arrangements for that very contingency.  His suggestions
were not adopted at the Prussian Headquarters, but his zeal was
approved in the right place.  He became Prefect of Rethel a little
later, when Berlin was settled at Versailles.


He stopped now, on his way back to his villa, to send the town-band
round to the Place of the Prefecture and to bribe some loafers with
small silver to mix with the crowd and cheer for the Emperor and the
Prince.  Consequently, a drum, trombone, cornet, and ophicleide
shortly made their appearance before the Imperial lodgings....  _La
Reine Hortense_ and _Partant Pour La Syrie_ entertained Monseigneur
while he breakfasted.  Since then he had thrice been summoned out
upon the balcony to acknowledge the acclamations of the loyal
populace of Rethel.

It was pouring rain, and the knots of spies, loafers, and genuine
enthusiasts were sheltered by umbrellas.  The very fowls that pecked
between the cobbles had a listless and draggled air.  The boy
shivered as he turned from the dismal outdoor prospect to contemplate
the Empire hangings, ormolu girandoles, and obsolete, scroll-backed
chairs and claw-foot tables, gracing the Prefect's wife's
reception-room.  He told himself that it was horrible, even when one
waited for the news of certain victory, to be shut up in a beastly
hole like this.

He nearly jumped for joy when the name of M. de Straz was brought him
by his equerry.  He remembered the Roumanian agent, who had
previously been presented to him.

"Pray bring him quickly, M. le Comte," he said eagerly to M. d'Aure,
who had replaced old M. Bachon.  "It is possible that he may bring a
message from the Emperor."

He colored, and his eyes regained a little of their old brightness.
The green-and-gold equerry, who loved him, as did every member of his
household, was glad to see him, interested, for more reasons than one.

Straz, known to be a secret agent of the Emperor, and hailing from
Rheims, where his employer was now--Straz might well amuse the Prince
while his protectors waited for an Imperial telegram.  Meanwhile, the
bodyguard about the Prefecture was unostentatiously doubled, the
carriages and the baggage were secretly held in readiness for a move.

You can imagine Straz, with his profile and beard of a courtier of
old Nineveh, bowing over the boyish hand, and rolling his jet-black,
glittering eyes.  He had looked better in his Astrachan-trimmed
traveling jacket than in the tight-waisted, closely buttoned, black
frock-coat and pearl-gray trousers of ceremony, and the inky river of
black silk cravat that flowed over the expanse of white shirt-front
now covering his Herculean chest.

He wore white spats, which made his short legs appear shorter.  A
bouquet adorned his buttonhole--pink carnation and tuberose.  Its
cloying fragrance hung heavily on the damp air of the Prefecture
reception-room, as the boy pleasantly said:

"Good-day, M. de Straz; do you come to us from the Emperor?"

"Yes, my Prince, and no!..."  Straz had long ago got rid of his cold,
yet a certain thickness characterized his consonants.  He shrugged
his great shoulders and smiled, showing his dazzling double curves of
solid human ivory.  "I come from Rheims, where His Imperial Majesty
is making history....  I am not charged with any message from him!"

The boy's face fell.  He said, with a brave effort to conquer his
disappointment: "I am impatient, Monsieur, for news of another
victory.  It is so long since the engagement of Saarbrück, and that
was only a little one.  You are an officer in the Army of Roumania,
you have told me.  You are aware, even better than I, that military
plans take time to develop ..  and that Papa has every confidence in
the generalship of M. de Bazaine....  If I were five or six years
older, I should be admitted to the Councils of the Imperial État
Major....  I should understand the reasons for these changes which
puzzle me....  But one thing I should like to ask..."  He flushed and
glanced round nervously.  "They do not believe in Paris or London
that we are being ... beaten?...  I beg of you to answer me candidly!"

Straz drew himself up dramatically, expanding his huge chest, and
curling his parted mustache.  His fierce black eyes, staring from
their great curved arches, glittered like balls of polished jet....

"They do not, my Prince!  They wait for the Star of the Bonapartes to
rise resplendent from a sea of gore shed from Prussian veins....
They wait, as the world waits, for the Empire to emerge more glorious
than ever from this conflict, which will restore to her forever her
lost Provinces of the Rhine.  It may be that the Coronation of
Napoleon IV. will be solemnized in the Cathedral of Cologne....  Aha,
my Prince, have I won a smile at last?"


He looked, despite the frock-coat, more than ever like some ancient
warrior of Assyria, marching in a carved and painted procession along
the walls of some unearthed palace of Nineveh or Babylon.  And so
admirable an actor was he that the sick heart of the boy now warmed
at his simulated fire, and gladdened at his deceptive words of hope.

"I had pictured my Imperial Prince," he went on, "in brighter and
less gloomy surroundings, with sympathetic and delightful companions
to alleviate his exile from home."

He had touched the wrong chord.  The slender, well-made figure was
drawn up proudly.  The delicate brows frowned, the lips quivered as
the boy said:

"Monsieur, it is not 'exile' when an officer is ordered on Active
Service....  And I am with the French Army, whose uniform I wear.
For the moment the Emperor, my commanding officer, has ordered me to
remain here....  I did wrong to grumble--I shall do so no more!"

Straz grinned and bowed to cover his momentary confusion.  Why had he
used the indigestible word?  He touched his buttonhole bouquet and
said with a treacly inflection:

"There are no violets--it is not the proper season....  Does
Monseigneur remember when the purple blooms reached him regularly at
intervals, one timid scrap of paper hiding among the slender stems?
... And would he, did he know how the sender languished for news of
him--entrust me with one penciled message of kindness that might
restore the rose to a fading cheek?"

The clear-eyed, fresh face of the boy he harangued underwent several
changes during this windy apostrophe.  For one brief instant it
flushed and brightened eagerly, then it frowned with perplexity, then
it twitched with the evident desire to laugh.

He said, controlling his amusement with his grace of good-breeding:

"Monsieur, if it was a lady who sent me those violets, pray tell her
that she was very good to do so, and that I thank her very much.  And
since she asks for a message--perhaps this will do as well?"

He turned to the writing-table, where some sheets, covered with
clever pen-and-ink caricatures, lay on the blotter, and took up a
rough little outline drawing of a landscape, marked with lines of
dots and written over with notes.  He said ingenuously, offering this
to the Roumanian:

"See, Monsieur, this is a mere sketch of the affair at Saarbrück.  I
did it to send my tutor at Paris, but M. Filon shall have another
one....  If the lady has sons of my age, no doubt they will be able
to draw far better.  Nevertheless, here it is!"

Under the date of August 2nd, he had signed it, with a touch of
boyish vanity:

  "_Under fire for the first time.
      "Your affectionate
          "Louis Napoleon._"


"What genius!--what a gift!  How gracious an act of kindness on the
part of your Imperial Highness!"

Straz grabbed the little scrawl eagerly, pressed his moist scarlet
lips to it with theatrical devotion--made a tremendous flourish of
putting it away in a pocketbook, and bestowing this receptacle near
the region of his heart.

"Though the lady has no sons--she is not even yet married," he
hinted.  "Dare I confide a secret to Monseigneur?--she is a young and
beautiful girl!"

Monseigneur had been promising himself to caricature Straz at the
next opportunity, not forgetting to make the most of his profile,
hair, and beard.  Young and beautiful girls were no novelties to
Louis Napoleon, accustomed to do the honors of Versailles and Saint
Cloud to the muslin-clad daughters of the sparkling coquettes who
frequented the Imperial Circle.  He began, struggling with the
boredom that began to oppress him:

"If the young girl is your _fiancée_, Monsieur, or your daughter----"

The speaker broke off at the sound of hoofs and wheels on the
cobblestones of the Place, the bump of a carriage-step let down,
hitting the curb before the Prefecture....  Someone had arrived with
a message from the Emperor; or perhaps it was only the Prefect's wife
returning from an airing....  Straz would have been other than
himself had he failed to seize the opportunity.

"Monseigneur, Mademoiselle de Bayard is not affianced.  She has
hitherto declined all alliances proposed as advantageous--it is said
her affections are secretly engaged!..."

His smirk revolted even while it fascinated.  He said, rolling his
glistening black eyes about the apartment--shrugging his great
shoulders, laying a thick white squat-nailed finger mysteriously
against his carmine lips:

"Engaged since a little _rencontre_ that took place in the month of
January....  There were disturbances in Paris--which the troops had
been called out to quell.  Riding with M. de Frossard in the Avenues
of the Champs Élysées, your Highness passed close by a young girl in
a cab.  She cried out, '_Vive le Prince Impérial!_' ... She threw a
knot of violets, which struck your horse on the shoulder....  You had
the flowers in your hand, Monseigneur, when you rode away."

"Ah, now I remember!"  The boy's blush became him.  "Or I should say
I have not forgotten.  And where is she now, Monsieur?"

"Where is Mademoiselle de Bayard?  Your Imperial Highness would like
to know?"

Straz, who had thrilled with a sportsman's joy at the curtsey of the
float betokening a nibble, would have given his soul to know
himself....  Now, as he delayed, with the air of one who momentarily
holds back something eagerly waited for, the equerry knocked and
entered, approached and whispered to the Prince.




LV

"But surely, M. le Comte, it would please me to receive these two
ladies.  M. de Straz has just been speaking of Mademoiselle de
Bayard."

And he dismissed Straz, who for once had been stricken speechless;
giving his hand to him and saying: "I am very much obliged by your
visit, Monsieur!"

The equerry retired, shepherding the unstrung Roumanian.  The Prince
waited, looking at the door.

He heard footsteps descending the stairs, a slight bustle in the
hall, or so it seemed to him.  Once a raised voice cried out
something, drowned in the buzzing of the crowd that now gorged the
Place of the Prefecture.

It still rained.  The brass helmets of the Fire-Brigade and the black
shakos of the local police strung out along the edge of the pavement,
showed as fringing a solid mass of dripping umbrellas; there were
clumps of more privileged umbrellas in the middle of the Place, where
a hackney-carriage now stood, doubtless the vehicle that a moment
previously had stopped before the door.  The Cent Gardes had their
undress cocked-hats on; their blue-caped mantles, pulled out in
cavalry fashion over the hindquarters of their tall brown horses,
shed off the merciless downpour like penthouse roofs....

Brr!  It was chilly.  Why did not Mademoiselle come?  Such delay was
rather a breach of etiquette.

Meanwhile, there upon the blotter lay a sheet of paper, with an
unfinished caricature upon it--masterly, considering that a mere boy
had drawn it--representing M. Thiers, bald, spectacled, oracularly
smiling, in the guise of a gobbling turkey-cock.

M. Thiers would keep.  The Prince chose another sheet, and began his
portrait of the Roumanian, humming a song, popular with the African
infantry-regiments, in capital tune and time.  "_Gentle Turco_" had
been half sung through when the door opened.  The crisp grizzled
curls, tanned soldierly face, waxed mustache, and green-and-silver
uniform of the equerry reappeared upon the threshold, ushering in a
small young lady....  D'Aure said, as the boy laid down his pen, rose
and came toward them:

"Monseigneur, I bring the young lady of whom I spoke to you, daughter
of Colonel de Bayard, 777th Chasseurs of the Emperor's Guard.  She
has convinced me of her identity by showing me a portrait, and a
letter from her father....  She begs me to assure you that she will
not detain you longer than ten minutes.  For that space of time I
will return to the lady downstairs."  He added at the Prince's glance
of inquiry: "The lady is the wife of a French officer, and
accompanied Mademoiselle de Bayard.  As I went downstairs just now
with M. de Straz, we encountered both ladies in the vestibule.  A
giddiness seized the elder, she cried out, and swooned away."

The Prince said:

"Pray give orders that the sick lady is to have every attention!"

D'Aure answered that the wife of the Prefect was with Madame even
then.  He saluted, and repeated with an accent of finality:

"For the space of ten minutes, Monseigneur...."

Then he bowed to Mademoiselle de Bayard, and went quickly out of the
room.

The Prince began, with a touch of boyish pompousness:

"We have met before, Mademoiselle.  My thanks for the violets!"

For he knew this face with cheeks so fairly rose-tinted, with eyes
that shone brilliant as blue jewels from their covert of black
lashes, with the softly-smiling mouth.  The dull moth shone out a
butterfly in the radiance of the joy that overbrimmed her.  She was
near her Prince Imperial, Juliette de Bayard, who was not so much
loyal as Loyalty incarnate, to whom the tawdry figure of the Emperor
was invested with godlike splendor, in whose esteem the Empire was
France--her France....


She was attired as she had been when she left Brussels with Adelaide.
Only a fichu of black and white Malines lace that she had brought in
the handbag containing linen and toilet requisites, had been pinned
about her narrow, sloping shoulders, and a tiny bonnet matching this
was perched upon her magnificent coils of cloudy-black hair.  Her
deft fingers had fashioned it in a few minutes out of the long ends
of the over-ample fichu.  A bunch of fragrant red roses had been
pinned upon her bosom by Madame.  She had purchased out of her own
slender resources a fringed gray silk parasol and a pair of little
gray kid gloves.  And in this hastily arranged toilette she looked
elegant, refined, exclusive as any slender aristocrat of the Faubourg
St. Germain.  You would never have suspected the tumult beneath her
sedate composure.  Yet she thrilled in every fiber as she swept her
stateliest curtsey before the slender boy in the unassuming uniform
of a subaltern of infantry.

"Monseigneur is too good to remember so infinitely trifling an
occurrence ... more than gracious to consent to receive me now!  But
that my dear father is a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians, I
would not dare to intrude upon the privacy of my Prince.  Oh,
Monseigneur! of your pity prevail upon the Emperor to obtain the
exchange of my father for some German officer of equal rank in his
Army!  Think, oh, pray!--think how I..."

She stopped to control herself ... felt for her handkerchief to dry
the tears that were blinding her ... dropped the scrap of cambric
upon the Aubusson carpet gracing the drawing-room of the Prefecture.
The Prince picked the handkerchief up as Mademoiselle hastily stooped
to recover it ... their heads encountered in the act.  The bump was a
hard one--Juliette could have sunk into the earth with confusion....
But the Prince rubbed his forehead, grinned, and called out like any
other schoolboy:

"My word! that was a stunner!  I do hope you're not hurt?  Are you,
as it happens, Mademoiselle?"

"No, no, Monseigneur!  But you?..."

"I am all right!  Saw lots of stars, though!"

He burst out laughing.  And so infectious was the peal of merriment
that for one blissful moment of forgetfulness Juliette joined in.

"To laugh does the heart good," the boy assured her.  He went on: "Do
not be unhappy, for I will telegraph to the Emperor.  He never denies
me anything I ask him....  Depend upon it, he will do everything in
his power for your father, Mademoiselle!"

She looked all thanks, saying in her voice of silver:

"I shall pray with redoubled fervor for His Imperial Majesty.  And
for you, Monseigneur--be well assured of it!  Now, with all my
gratitude, I will retire if your Highness permits?"

She swept her curtsey, and would have withdrawn then had not
Monseigneur called out eagerly:

"No, no!  We have still eight of our ten minutes!  Don't go!...  I do
so like the way you talk....  Mon Dieu!  What would the Empress say
to me if she knew that I had left a lady standing!  Pray sit down
here, Mademoiselle!"

He turned round the writing-chair in which he had been sitting, made
her take it--perched himself upon the corner of the writing-table, a
schoolboy of fifteen in spite of his uniform, pouring out his heart
to a girl older than he.

"It was horrible here until you came!...  I was so lonely!  Everybody
looks so strange, and no news comes through.  It would have been
better to have stayed at Metz, where there is fighting.  But no!  We
were compelled to return to Châlons....  On our way we were nearly
caught by the German cavalry.  They are terribly daring ... they even
ventured into our lines at Longeville....  But we got to Verdun and
traveled to Châlons in a third-class carriage.  Frightfully dirty,
and full of things that bit....  And I washed my face in a thick
glass tumbler, out of which I had drunk some wine they brought me....
Fact, I assure you!...  But we soldiers don't mind hardships....  We
get used to them, Mademoiselle!"

She looked up at the brightened face with the tenderness of an elder
sister.  He went on with increasing animation and growing confidence:

"Do you see that little black box standing there in the corner?
That's my officer's kit--all the baggage we're allowed to have on
Active Service.  There are other boxes with other things..."  He
blushed.  "The valets look after them....  But this I keep under my
own eye.  And here!...  This I hold as a great treasure.  Do you
think I would show it to everyone?...  _Non, merci!_ ... Behold,
Mademoiselle!"

He took from a pocket beneath his tunic and showed her a splinter of
rusty iron wrapped in an envelope.

"Guess what this is!  A bit of a real German bombshell....  It burst
quite close to the Emperor and me....  I thought a lot of old iron
was being shot out of a cart, there was such a racket....  This
should be a keepsake for the friend one loves above all, should it
not?  Otherwise I would give it you, Mademoiselle!"

She said:

"Monseigneur is too generous....  I need no token by which to
remember him!...  Have I not the remembrance of the sympathy and
condescension with which my Prince has listened to a daughter's
prayer?...  Now, indeed, I must take leave of Monseigneur!..."

He persisted with boyish eagerness:

"No, no!  M. d'Aure will certainly return at the end of our ten
minutes.  And I do like you so much, Mademoiselle!...  Will you write
and tell me when the Emperor obtains the release of M. le Colonel?
... Will you let me hear how you liked the little sketch I gave M. de
Straz for you?"

She was puzzled, and looked it:

"Monseigneur will pardon me, but the name of M. de Straz is that of a
stranger....  Yet he has received from Monseigneur a message for
me?..."

Louis Napoleon explained.  She listened with a gravity that chilled
his amusement over the message he had sent to the supposedly elderly
sender of the violets.

She said, looking at him steadily with her sincere eyes:

"I sent Monseigneur no violets, with messages written or otherwise.
To have done so would have been presumptuous, and lacking in
delicacy....  If this M. de Straz were but here....  If Monseigneur
could but describe him!..."

Monseigneur caught up the unfinished caricature:

"Look, Mademoiselle!  This is he!"

It was he....  The Assyrian head, great torso, and short legs had
been grotesquely exaggerated.  But the ferocity, sentimentality, and
sensuality mingling in the exotic temperament of the Roumanian, had
been conveyed with a mastery of technique and a grasp of character
astonishing, considering the artist's youth.  And seeing, Juliette
recognized the man they had encountered in the vestibule.  Just as he
had passed them, Adelaide had cried out, and sunk down helplessly in
a genuine swoon.

"Ah, yes, Monseigneur, I have seen this gentleman, but a few moments
ago.  We encountered him at the instant of entering the house.  But I
do not know him--I have never before met him!  Why, then, should M.
de Straz speak familiarly of me?"

The boy said, with a tactfulness that was ingratiating:

"Never mind!...  He was playing some stupid trick!...  He shall be
punished if he offends you.  See!  I am tearing up the ugly picture!"

"Oh, Monseigneur!"

She was too late to save the drawing.  He went on, tossing away the
bits:

"Meanwhile--since the sketch I meant for you has been given to this
person, you shall have my shell-splinter, though at first I meant it
for--Cavaignac."

He had never uttered this name, about which so many lonely day-dreams
clung, in the hearing of any second person.  He could hardly believe
that he had done so now as he went on:

"Take my souvenir, and shut your hand over it, and promise me you
will never part with it.  If you will, I can tell you about
Cavaignac--my friend, Mademoiselle!"

She complied with his wish, smiling at the tone of authority.  She
thought, looking in the beautiful frank blue eyes, that Cavaignac
must be proud of his high place in this princely young heart.

"He is brave, Mademoiselle, and handsome and wonderfully clever.
Once he gained the second prize for Greek translation at the Concours
General.  And Greek is horribly difficult.  M. Edeline could never
teach it me.  I find the grammar so dreadfully dull!  And yet
Alexander the Great was a Greek general, and would have told me all
about his campaigns in the Greek language....  I think I must find it
hard to study because the figures of people mean more to me than
letters and words!...  I like better to draw caricatures of my
masters than to listen to them!"

Juliette said, with something maternal in her accent:

"That is unwise, Monseigneur....  For the better we learn, the sooner
we part with the teacher, do not we?"

He said, in a tone of wounded pride rather than vanity:

"I have always attended carefully to my Military Governor when he
gave us lessons in scientific warfare.  For a Napoleon must always be
a soldier and a strategist....  Riding came easily--anybody can learn
to ride well!...  When I have pleased my tutors most, my reward has
been--unless it was in July or August--a day with the stag-hounds at
Fontainebleau, or St. Germain or Compiègne....  The Emperor has given
me two magnificent Irish hunters...."  He added with naïve boyish
vanity: "And the uniform of our Imperial Hunt is splendid, you
know....  Gold-laced cocked hat with white plumes, green coat with
crimson velvet facings, white leathers and jack-boots.  Last night I
dreamed I was hunting with Cavaignac ... the brown forest flying by
as we galloped through the frosty fern....  The sky was pale red, and
a diamond star hung just under the tip of the new moon of November.
We were foremost of all when the stag turned to bay at the Pools of
Saint Pierre....  Then the horns sounded the _hallali_, the Chief
Huntsman offered me the knife, and I said to him: '_M. Leemans, you
will give it to my friend, M. Cavaignac!_' ..."

"And then, Monseigneur?..."

He had told the dream with unexpected spirit and fire.  That gallop
through the wintry forest-rides had been stimulatingly real to
Juliette.  She had thrilled as the hard-pressed buck had leaped into
the pool, and turned with antlers lowered against the ravening jaws
of the pack.  Now, though she shrank from the thought of the spilled
blood--she wanted to hear the rest of it.  She wished always to
remember this story, told solely for her, by the son of her
Emperor....

"Shall I tell you?  The end is not as nice as the beginning or the
middle...."  He hesitated, frowning a little, then took up the broken
thread: "I thought I took the knife and held it out to him, and he
suddenly snatched it and I felt the blade pierce my heart right
through....  He said, with his dark, bright eyes on mine: '_Son of my
father's enemy, I slay despots, not animals!_' ... And I felt the hot
blood bubbling in my throat as I answered: '_You have killed a great
faith and a great love!_'"

It was rhetoric of a bombastic, youthful kind, but not without
pathos.  His lips quivered.  He nipped them together, and blinked
away the stinging salt moisture that had risen in his bright eyes.
Juliette said, aching to console him:

"Dreams go by contraries, according to my schoolmates of the Convent.
Your friendship with M. Cavaignac will not be severed by the blade of
a hunting-knife."

He shook his head.

"Or rather it is by my hand that the stab will be given....  Yet how
could that be, when I like him so very, very much? ... Is it not
strange, I have never spoken to Cavaignac, and yet I would have
chosen him for my companion above all others, before even Espinasse
or Chino Murat!..."

"I think I understand..." Juliette said, feeling the tug of his
craving for affection and sympathy, realizing the loneliness that had
found relief in hero-worship, and heartily pitying her Emperor's son.
"When the heart speaks, one cannot shut one's ears; one must listen
always....  Among hundreds of faces there is one that paints itself
upon the memory ... there is one voice that makes good music when
others only tire the ear....  There is one nature that seems more
open, fresh, and candid than others....  Without knowing that you do
so, you continually compare it with them....  And when you are sad or
lonely, you would wish that person to be near you....  You remember
his gray eyes with specks of brown and golden in them, and the curly
hair, and the pleasant lips.  You regret that when you met him you
were not more charming, more amiable....  You feel chagrin to
remember that you were neither of these things....  You would like to
hold out the hand as they do in England, and say, 'Pardon, pardon,
that I misunderstood you, my friend!'"

The boy's blue eyes rounded.  His fair brows puckered in perplexity.
Too well-bred to interrupt, he listened with increasing surprise.

"Pardon that I regarded you as a brusque, untidy boy, when you had
been robbed, and were homeless, and suffering from hunger.  For
Monica's sake, you hid it.  And I applaud that noble silence!  I
admire you with all my heart!..."

The Prince broke in:

"But Cavaignac has not been robbed, and who ever said he was hungry?
He lives with Madame, his mother ... they are not rich, certainly!
As Madame is a widow and he an only son, he is exempt from military
service.  He is to embrace the profession of Literature--he will
write great books or great plays, or edit a newspaper....  And I
would like to help him to climb to the very top of the ladder....
Secretly--because he would never accept anything that came from
me!...  Am I stupid, Mademoiselle?"

She said with warmth that covered a slight confusion, caused by that
slip of the tongue an instant before:

"Ah, no, indeed! but very kind and generous.  Perhaps, if it were
possible, M. Cavaignac would be proud and glad to know you were his
friend.  It may be that the affection he inspires in you, he returns,
though he does not own it.  There can be no harm in thinking this, at
least!"

The Prince said, with animation:




LVI

"I saw him, I am convinced, when we left Saint-Cloud, outside the
station near the Gate of Orleans.  He stood apart from the soldiers
and the people....  He was all in black, and had grown older and
taller.  He looked at me earnestly, and slightly raised his hat as
the carriage drove up.  I saluted in answer, and the Empress asked
me: '_Who is that grave young man?  Do you know him?_'  I said: '_My
mother, I have never spoken to him in my life!_' ... You would have
thought the Empress very brave, if you had seen her, Mademoiselle.
Nobody could have guessed she had been weeping.  Though the night
before we left for Metz ... when she came to me in my bed..."

His lips twitched, and one big tear brimmed over and splashed on the
sleeve of his piou-piou's uniform.  He flushed bright red, and
whisked it off as though it were a wasp that would have stung.

"She brought me a new medal to hang on the collar I wear always."  He
slid a finger inside the edge of his stiff military stock, and hooked
up an inch of gold chain.  "It has on one side a figure of Our
Blessed Lady crushing the head of the serpent, and on the other there
is the Cross with two hearts.  The Holy Father has blessed it; it was
sent to Rome purposely....  Mothers are anxious when their sons are
called upon Active Service....  It is natural, is it not?"

Juliette's eyes were wet with pity for the Empress.  She bent her
head in assent.  The boy went on, shrugging his slender shoulders:

"For me--I like better to have soldiers about me than a lot of people
in embroidered tail-coats.  If I had been twenty, I should have been
at Wörth with the Duke of Magenta....  I would have died at the head
of my troops rather than have consented to that shameful retreat....
'_Over my body!_' ... that is what I would have said to them....
'_Do you wish me to dishonor the blood of Napoleon the Great?_'"

He crossed to the fireplace and stood upon the Turkey hearthrug, a
boyish figure reflected in the great Venetian mirror that hung above
the carved stone mantelpiece.  The outpouring had relieved the
nervous tension; the red flush had died out of his fair temples, the
smooth forehead was no longer disfigured with a scowl.

"If I might only have remained with the Army at Metz, I would have
asked nothing better.  But instead of staying to fight the Prussians,
we drove away when they came in sight.  It was ignominious....  It
made me feel horribly!...  And the Emperor would not show it, but I
know he suffered, too.  Then the camp was beastly....  There was no
pretense of discipline.  Their officers could hardly restrain the
mobilists.  There was even mutiny among those who had returned from
Alsace-Lorraine--the Algerian troops of the Army of MacMahon!"

His agitation made him stutter as the words came pouring from him.

"They wanted to be led once more against the Germans!--to be avenged
for all their losses and misfortunes!...  I understood why they were
difficult....  They did not understand why we did not march at once
to the northeast frontier.  No more did I....  I was unreasonable,
like them!  But now we are advancing--soon, soon, you will hear
something!...  We will effect a junction of our Army with M. de
Bazaine's, and sweep the Prussians out of France!"

He was walking up and down, swinging his arms, gesticulating,
grinding his heels into the arabesques of the Aubusson carpet at
every turn.

"Then there will be great popular rejoicings--the Emperor will
receive his due--there will be no more misunderstandings.  For the
Emperor is terribly misunderstood, Mademoiselle, and he is no longer
young or strong....  He has so many bitter enemies....  I have heard
him say so, weeping--the Emperor, Mademoiselle!..."

"Oh, hush, Monseigneur!"

But he did not heed Juliette's entreaty.

"I have heard him crying out to God in his room at midnight, when he
thought everyone was asleep, and he was quite alone: '_My God! is
this the beginning of the punishment?  Must the price of my success
be ruin, defeat, disgrace!_'...  Then I stole away and made a prayer
for him and for myself, Mademoiselle....  I say it regularly every
night since then."

His boyish pompousness, pride, and vanity had fallen from him like a
tinsel diadem.  Chivalry and loyalty, unselfishness and devotion
shone from and irradiated the child.

"'_My God, if Thou dost save up happiness for me, I pray Thee to take
it away, and give it to my father, who needs it so badly....  And, my
God, if Thou indeed art angry with him, I beseech Thee to grant him
Thy pardon, and punish me, instead.  All I ask Thee for myself is
that I may know Thy Will, and obey It, that I may do my duty bravely,
and die when the end of my life comes without dishonor and without
fear!_'  Is that a good prayer, do you think, Mademoiselle?"

Before she could command herself sufficiently to answer, there was a
knock at the door, and the equerry came in.  He looked eager and
vexed, excited and disappointed.  Varying emotions seemed to clash in
him.  But he said, smiling and saluting as the Prince turned toward
him:

"The ten minutes are over, Monseigneur!"

"Ten minutes ago, Monsieur, to speak correctly," said Monseigneur,
with a mischievous look.  Then his face changed.  "News!" he called
out eagerly.  "You have dispatches from the Emperor!...  Don't play a
farce with me, Count, I beg of you! when there is the telegram
sticking out of your cuff!"

And with the nimbleness of a gamin and the audacity of a spoiled
princeling, he threw himself upon the equerry and captured the prize.

"From the Emperor at Rheims--no! don't retire, Mademoiselle!  You are
discreet--not like women who talk! ... You shall share my good news
with me....  He says: '_There has been furious fighting at Mars la
Tour.  Battles are raging at Flauville, Flavigny, and Vionville.  The
Prince will remain for the present at Bethel, where the Emperor will
rejoin him on the 27th.  As it is not considered advisable to effect
a junction with Bazaine, the march of the Army of Châlons is directed
upon Sedan._'"

The mischief died out of the dancing eyes, the mobile face whitened
with disappointment.  He repeated, staring blankly at the paper:

"For what did we leave Châlons, if not to assist Bazaine?...  _Mon
Dieu!_...  What infamy!...  Why am I not a man?"

He grew crimson and burst into a tempest of sobbing.  He tore the
pale green paper into fragments and trampled them beneath his feet.
His eyes blazed through the tears that streamed from them as he
stammered between his gasps and chokings:

"Cowards!...  Traitors!...  Disgraced forever!...  Is there no honor
left in France?"

"Come, Mademoiselle, in pity!" entreated the equerry, as deadly pale
as Monseigneur was red.  He held open the door with a shaking hand,
and Juliette hurriedly quitted the drawing-room.  The door shut upon
the sobs and outcries.  The Count said, with a sigh of relief, wiping
the perspiration from his face:

"You will not speak of this?  His Imperial Highness is overwrought
and excited.  It will pass presently.  Let me conduct you downstairs!"

The hall of the Prefecture reached, a servant in the livery of the
establishment approached the equerry.  It appeared that the lady who
had accompanied Mademoiselle had recovered from her indisposition,
and departed, leaving no message for her young friend.

"Madame will have returned to her hotel," said the equerry.  He
added: "By chance, Mademoiselle, the dispatches we have just received
contain proof that your friend has been misled by false intelligence.
Colonel le Bayard has not been taken prisoner.  He is now in command
of his regiment with the First Brigade of Cavalry of General
Clérambault's Division, now engaged with the Third Corps in the
neighborhood of Metz."

Then as Juliette turned red and pale, and looked at him in breathless
questioning, he added, pulling a vestibule-chair from its place near
the wainscot and making her sit down:

"Rest there one moment....  I will speak to Colonel Watrin.  He is
now at mess with his officers in the Prefect's billiard-room."

Watrin of the Bodyguard, Chief of the Prince Imperial's escort, came
clanking and jingling from his dinner to confirm the fact as stated
by the equerry.  The 777th Chasseurs, belonging to de Clérambault's
Division of the Third Corps of the Army of Bazaine, were certainly
now engaged in the neighborhood of Gravelotte.  But as certainly they
had not come into contact with the enemy previously to the fifteenth
of the month.

The fifteenth!--the very day on which Adelaide had baited her trap
with an imprisoned father....  Joy at the discovery, indignation at
having been so easily cajoled into captivity, brought back the red to
Juliette's pale cheeks and the light to her sad eyes.

This strange, wayward, mysterious mother might exercise over her
daughter a certain degree of maternal authority.  The supreme
obedience, the first duty was to the father, that was clear.  Now she
was going straight to him, wherever he might be.  She was strong
enough, for his dear sake, to take whatever risks were involved.

Suppose Adelaide insisted on accompanying her?  It was unthinkable
that even so hardy an offender should venture into the presence of
one so wronged....  Meet his look!...  Read in his face his scorn of
perfidy!  Juliette put away the possibility from her with both hands.

We know that Madame Adelaide had contemplated this very move upon
occasion.  But she had not met Mademoiselle de Bayard then.  Since
the encounter had taken place she had realized that the establishment
of maternal influence, strong enough to make of her daughter a
confederate and ally, was a task beyond her powers.

Her grace, her charm, were lost upon this pale, frigid, obstinate
little being, in whom she saw her mother-in-law over again.  For than
this girl, sprung of her own flesh, whose veins were filled with her
blood, nothing could be more unlike Adelaide, that magnificent
creature of impulses and desires and appetites....

Dominion over de Bayard could never be regained and established while
his daughter sat by his hearth a virgin unwed.  Why had Adelaide
hindered her marriage to M. Tessier?  Pacing the Turkey carpet of the
Prefect's library, Madame admitted that she had acted inadvisedly.
That the plan of bringing Juliette into contact with the Prince
Imperial would be discounted by the innocence of the girl and the
inexperience of the boy.

She could imagine the dialogue they were holding at that moment, all,
"_Oh, Mademoiselle!_" and "_Ah, Monseigneur!_"...  The girl should
have been permitted to celebrate her nuptials with this dull young
husband of her father's choosing....  Then a few years later would
have come the opportunity.  She ground her teeth, thinking how her
precipitation had spoiled everything ... thrust her....  Ah, Heaven!
how one shuddered at the recollection, almost into the clutches of
the Wielder of the Bowstring, the ingenious inventor of the Ordeal of
the Looking-Glass....

Straz....  At the sight of him her heart had stopped beating.  In
imagination those strangling silken folds had closed, shutting out
light and breath....

How he had leered, rolling those fierce black eyes of his.  "_So,_"
his jeering smile had said, "_my Sultana and her slave have met
again.  Did I not prophesy truly, sweet one, tell me? when I said you
would never again look in your toilette-mirror without remembering
me!_"

Her nerves were raveled to threads--her will was weakening....
Despite her hatred and her overwhelming fear of the man, she knew
that he was her master.  That if he fixed those eyes upon her and
beckoned _Come!_ she would have to obey....

Was he still here?  The book-lined walls seemed closing in on her.
The atmosphere was suffocating ...  she must escape from this place
or go mad.

The Prefect's wife had been called away, after kindly ministrations
with smelling-salts and red lavender.  Adelaide opened the library
door a little way, and looked forth cautiously.  Except the two Cent
Gardes on duty at the foot of the principal staircase, there was
nobody stirring in the hall or vestibule.

As she told herself so, a red baize-covered door at a flagged rear
passage-end was opened.  The Prince's equerry came out with the Chief
of the Bodyguard, an oblong pale green paper was in the equerry's
hand.  Both officers' faces were pale.  Colonel Watrin's was livid
and distorted with emotion.  He said to his companion in a low voice,
and with a despairing gesture:

"It needed but this to hasten the catastrophe!...  All is over!...
The Empire is lost!"

Then he went back.  The red baize door shut upon him.  The equerry
came through the passage, entered the hall, and went quickly up the
stairs.  He was going to break to the Emperor's son the news of some
terrible disaster ... to say to him, as Watrin had said: "_All is
over!...  The Empire is lost!_"

With all a woman's intuition, Adelaide leaped at the truth and
comprehended the situation.  What did she in the galley of a ruined,
sinking Empire?  What advantage was to be gained by reconciliation
with Henri de Bayard now?  And with Straz in the neighborhood, what
madness to remain here....

As for the girl, she was possessed of money.  Let her go to her
father, or to her friends, or elsewhere....

So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by horrible
memories of the Roumanian.  She found the porter.  He hailed her
_fiacre_ from its waiting-place.  Madame stepped in gracefully, and
was jingled away, straight into the jaws of Straz!

"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of the Escort when
Juliette's determination to seek the shelter of her Colonel shaped
itself in a request for a military pass, a thing without which nobody
could penetrate the immediate area where the dreadful thing called
War was actually going on.  The speaker resumed:

"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at Châtel St.
Germain....  Provided Mademoiselle gets there without accident, and
can endure the noise of the bombardments--Mademoiselle may be quite
as safe"--he shrugged and twirled his imperial--"there as anywhere
else!..."

A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering the huge
conflict then waging, that was to wage until nightfall of the morrow,
between the Imperial Army of Metz and the First and Second Armies of
Germany.  But the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and
gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle.  Then she
thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining the attendance of the
servant whom the officer would have sent with her, and descended the
steps of the Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....

For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial dispatches, something
approaching to a panic was brewing....  The Place of the Prefecture
was packed with people ... the news of the frightful struggle near
Metz was buzzing from mouth to mouth.  It was whispered that defeat
was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret understanding with M.
de Bazaine....  Later on, when peasants who had hurried in from
villages on the outskirts, stragglers who had quitted the Army at the
commencement of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the
Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the presence
of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the local Fire-Brigade, an
attack upon the Imperial party at the Prefecture was anticipated; so
threatening became the attitude of the people, egged on by those
among them who were agents and spies of the enemy.

Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon the troubled
waters.  Perhaps it would be wiser to warn him not to come.  Well
might the officers who guarded the person of the Heir of a crumbling
Empire groan under the burden of their responsibilities.  Well might
the Prefect perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.


It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company did not
greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered by her interview
and armed with her permit, she tripped through the crowded streets to
the Hotel of the Crown, where they had spent the previous night.

"Madame had already returned," said the respectable Frenchwoman in
charge of the bureau.  "She gave notice of departure, and asked for
the account.  Then the gentleman arrived--a handsome man with
splendid eyes, brilliant as carbuncles, and hair and beard--my faith!
what hair and what a beard!  Madame cried out with ravishment upon
his entrance, for he would not be announced--he went up at once.
Possibly it was Madame's husband, or some near relative?"

Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question.  She was intent
upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag.  Without money one
could not reach Châtel St. Germain, and in the bag was her little
store of cash.  Trembling, she crept upstairs to the room she had
slept in, a dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's.
The discovery that the door was locked and the key in Adelaide's
possession was appalling.  She was delivered from the dilemma by a
chambermaid with a master-key.  As she stole in and seized her bag
she heard voices in the next room.  Certainly one was Adelaide's and
the other male.  A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a
muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian hawk-features and
fierce black eyes of Straz.

"_When the little Queen of Diamonds comes,_" the voice said, "_you
shall present me!_"  And a chuckle followed on the words that made
her cold.  Fortunately, some noise in the corridor covered her
retreat with her rescued property, and facilitated her departure
unobserved from the Hotel of the Crown....

The station was near enough to be reached in a few minutes.  She
learned there that a train would leave in ten minutes for Verdun.  At
Verdun she would have to change, provided the branch-line trains were
running, or proceed to Châtel St. Germain by road.

Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat in the dirty
station, waiting.  She was escaping from even greater perils than she
had feared, and yet when she found herself actually in the train, and
the train moving out of Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate
regret.

She had been so happy there....  She would never forget, even though
she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy,
confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.

The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal
drawing-room of the Prefecture....  Lingeringly Mademoiselle went
over the interview, and the parting--ah, me! there had been no
farewell!...  And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the
muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people,
she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped
shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and
seen...

Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying.  Only a boy's
hand, waved behind the pane.  As she whispered "_Adieu!_" looking up
at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they
two would meet on earth again.

It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and
noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that
kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.

What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child
of the Empire!...  What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered
to those guiltless lips!...

So young, so noble, so unfortunate!  The pity of it!...  He who might
have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend,
and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.


What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!...
That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan.
The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard
thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army,
conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the
premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect
preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of
the enemy....

From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....

What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling
uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel
back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him
to Belgian ground.

His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in
their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder
that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.

He was to attain manhood in exile.  Transplanted to the soil of a
foreign country, he was to develop into the _beau-ideal_ of a
youthful King among men.  High-minded, pure-hearted, excelling in
manly sports and martial exercises, the soul of honor, the fine
flower of French chivalry.  And in the spring of his manhood he was
to die by the assegais of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him
but the broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the
undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the trodden
grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.




LVII

Following the devious route of narrow paths by which the peasant had
guided them, P. C. Breagh made his way back to the battle-ground
between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.

Prussian spade-parties had made good progress during the three hours
of his absence.  Part of the field had been cleared, long parallel
trenches dug at twelve-foot intervals in the soft, soaked ground, and
German bodies decently interred therein.  Huge canvas sacks crammed
with identification-tags, papers and purses removed from these stood
ready to be carted away.  Volunteers and Red Cross helpers had
rendered like services to dead Frenchmen.  And at the head of a
trench, marked by a board on which was chalked in awkward letters:

  "CHASSEURS OF HORSE OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD.
  OFFICERS, 6;
  TROOPS, 200."

a single widish grave had been dug, in which had been deposited the
body of de Bayard.

The place was marked by a cross made of the broken, halves of a Uhlan
lance lashed with a fragment of cavalry picket-rope.  About the cross
Mademoiselle de Bayard's veil had been loosely tied, and the vertical
shaft topped, grimly enough, with M. le Colonel's talpack.  None of
the heavy clay soil had been thrown back.  Waiting some hand to draw
Earth's rude coverlet charitably over him, de Bayard lay, staring
back in the brazen face of the sun.

His green silver-braided dolman had been torn open--the
blood-drenched ceinture cut, showing the mortal lance-thrust.  The
red, silver-striped pantaloons had been slashed at the hips, no doubt
in search of pocket-book and purse.  It was difficult to credit that
the sternly extended right arm, and the determined frown graven deep
between the eyebrows, did not mean that Life was extinct, but merely
in abeyance; that the cold glitter of the bold dark eyes and the grim
setting of the pale mouth under the martial mustache would not warm
and soften and relax into a smile.

He was so disdainful in his rigid silence, so much a chief of men,
even in death, that the disheveled scallawag who dared to love his
daughter winced at the cold stare of those dark, glittering eyes.
But for Juliette's sake P. C. Breagh nerved himself to the sticking
point--got down into the squashy clay beside de Bayard, and took his
medals, and Cross of the Legion of Honor, giving him Juliette's
Rosary instead.

"You know, sir, I don't intend to take a liberty," he felt like
saying: "I'm only carrying out what I've given my word to do.  If I'm
not quite up to your mark, please overlook it!  As to being worthy of
_her_--_is_ any man breathing?  Ask yourself the question, and the
answer will be No...."

Save the Algerian, Crimean and Sardinian medals, and the Cross,
nothing of value remained upon the Colonel....

Some soldier having left a spade sticking in the clay at the head of
an unfinished trench, P. C. Breagh possessed himself of the utensil,
and began to fill the grave in, though the dead face looked at him so
haughtily that until he had covered it with the black silk veil, he
boggled hideously at the task.

Winking away the tears that blinded him, and gulping down the lump
that stuck in his throat, he finished.  Remained but the need of a
Catholic priest to read the Office.  You saw the caped cloak, and the
broad-brimmed hat, or the cossack and biretta of the Roman
ecclesiastic, working side by side with the Jewish rabbi, the English
Protestant clergyman, and the Lutheran pastor, in these
harvest-fields of death.  The secular priest and the tonsured
religious were to be found with the Red Cross Ambulance-trains and in
the temporary hospitals; doing their best for the souls and bodies of
their broken fellow-men, now that War had done the worst.

To whom should one appeal?  Hardly to the burly, bearded Franciscan,
who passed supporting a laden double-stretcher at the upper end.  You
saw his brown robe hitched up under his white girdle, and his
muscular bare legs, ending in boots of the elastic-sided description,
stained as though he had been treading out ripe grapes in the press.
An Army chaplain succeeded the monk, upright and thin, in a dark
military frock and black-banded forage-cap, half leading, half
carrying a French corporal of infantry, who had received a bullet
through both eyes.  Farther off, a gray-haired ecclesiastic, whose
dress betokened his episcopal dignity, was administering the Viaticum
to a dying Mecklenburg Hussar.  Even as the sublime Mystery of Faith
was uplifted--even as the Englishman bent the knee in adoration--his
glance fell upon the kneeling figure of an old man a few yards away.

Undoubtedly a priest, the poor shepherd of some poverty-stricken
country parish, for the cassock that covered the frail, wasted body
was threadbare, green with wear and heavily patched.  Absorbed in
devotion, his broad-brimmed hat lying on the ground before him, his
thin hands crossed upon his sunken breast, his white head erect, his
rapt gaze fixed upon the Host, he remained immovable, until the brief
but solemn rite was at an end.  Then he looked up at the sky--shaking
back the long white hair that had fallen about his peaked and meager
features--making three times rapidly the sign of the Cross.  And the
serene and beautiful peace that rested on that broad furrowed
forehead, the radiant smile upon the toothless mouth, and the beaming
kindliness in the brilliant dark eyes that rested on P. C. Breagh's,
told him that here was the needed man.

Yet he hesitated to speak to the priest, who rose and moved a few
steps farther to where a shell-torn horse, tangled in the
rope-harness that had attached to it a smashed artillery caisson, lay
groaning and thrashing its long neck and tortured head to and fro.

Parties of Uhlans told off for the purpose, were even then shooting
such hopelessly wounded victims.  But no merciful bullet had ended
the pain of this suffering beast.  It groaned again, and coughed up
blood as the old man stopped to look at it, and fixed its haggard
eyes almost humanly upon his face.

The appeal went home.  Stepping over the prone body of its dead
comrade, the old man bent over the horse and gently stroked its neck.
He said, and the words came clearly to Carolan:

"Poor creature of God! be thy sore anguish ended.  In the Name of the
Father ..."

As he ended the Triune Invocation, the horse's head sank down
heavily.  A deep sigh heaved the creature's sides, and exhaled in a
gasp.  The hind legs contracted sharply toward the body, and then
jerked out, heavily hitting the axle of the ammunition-cart.  All was
over.  The Samaritan moved away, but P. C. Breagh followed and
overtook him, crying:

"My Father..."  And the old man halted and turned himself, leaning
for support upon a knotted ash-stick and saying:

"Surely, my child.  Do you need my poor assistance?"

A lisping voice, speaking with a country accent.  And with that smile
of radiant kindness making it angelic--the face of Voltaire.

There were the features of the Philosopher of Ferney, rendered
familiar to this later age by many portraits and busts.  The broad
and lofty brow, the great orbital arches, the mobile expressive eyes,
wide-winged, sensitive hawk-beak, thin-lipped mouth, with the
subtly-curving corners and the deeply cleft humorous chin, were all
there.  The face lacked nothing of Voltaire but cynicism and devilry.
In place of these imagine a Divine simplicity, and a tenderness so
pure that the young man was abashed....

"My Father," he got out: "in charity to the dead and pity for the
living, will you consent to read the Office of Burial by a Catholic
soldier's graveside?"

"Surely, surely, my child," nodded the wearer of the threadbare
soutane.  And pulled out of his pocket a red-cotton handkerchief,
wrapped about a battered Office-book and a shabby stole, and trotted
back beside the Englishman.  Then, standing opposite to where the
green and red-plumed talpack topped the broken lance-shaft, he read
the Absolution, the _Libera me_, _Paternoster_ and Collects, and with
a wide and sweeping gesture, solemnly blessed the grave and the
trenches it neighbored, saying, at the close of the _De Profundis_
that followed, with one of those rare smiles that made the old face
beautiful exceedingly:

"My poor prayers are for all my children.  Now kneel and make your
confession.  No one will hear you--it is as though we were together
in my poor little church."

"But, my Father!..." P. C. Breagh protested.

The old man said, looking at him penetratingly:

"My child, you would tell me that not so very long ago you discharged
your religious obligations.  But to-day is the Octave of the
Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, and you have not confessed or
received Communion since Whitsuntide.  Will you tell me that your
conscience is clear enough to meet death without apprehension, when
Saints at the moment of dissolution tremble, anticipating the terrors
of the Divine Judgments of God!"

Tears stood in the radiant eyes, brimmed over and ran down in two
channels worn by that sorrowful-sweet smile of his....  He clasped
his hands entreatingly, then threw them wide, crying in a very
passion of pity and love:

"My poor child, with Death on every side of you, will you turn from
Him Who is Lord and Giver of Life?  And what shall I say to Him when
I stand before Him, and He asks me: '_Didst thou suffer a sinner to
depart whom pleadings might have won?_'"

There was no resisting that passionate entreaty.  Another instant,
and the barrier of pride broke down.  P. C. Breagh knelt in the raw,
moist clay by Henri de Bayard's graveside, and poured out his full
heart under the light yet thrilling pressure of those thin old hands
upon his head.

With the murmured blessing that followed the Absolution the hands
were withdrawn and their owner went away.  How he went and whither he
betook himself, his penitent never knew.




LVIII

The hamlet of Petit Plappeville lay strangely still and silent in the
westering sunshine.  Hitherto a small oasis of untouched ordinary
life situated on the edge of a vast area of blackened devastation, it
now partook in the general aspect of upheaval and ruin.  The doors of
the dozen cottages forming its single street stood wide open.
Household!  goods, furniture, clothing, broken loaves of bread,
smashed and empty wine-bottles were strewed upon the street and in
the little, flowery front yards.  All the doors stood open, some that
had been locked and driven in hung crookedly on twisted hinges, the
broken windows displayed shattered splinters edging gaping holes.
Not a human being showed, not a fowl pecked among the litter.  The
hand of the marauder had plainly been at work.  P. C. Breagh groaned
as he crossed the threshold of Madame Guyot's cottage, such a scene
of domestic chaos housed between its denied walls.

Chests of drawers and cupboards had been ransacked of clothes and
linen, these, hideously befouled, had been rent into rags and thrown
upon the floor.  The fragments of the Englishman's knapsack,
temporarily left in Madame Guyot's keeping, the ruins of his
shaving-tackle, and some stray leaves of filled note-books,
deplorably appealed to their late owner's eyes.  But P. C. Breagh's
eyes were busied elsewhere.  With the ripped-up feather bed from the
inner chamber, where Juliette de Bayard had passed the previous
night.  With the soiled and trampled remnants of some delicate
articles of feminine underwear--a lace-frilled night-robe, a filmy
chemise.  He took them up with reverent, shaking hands--looked
instinctively for an initial....  There were letters embroidered in
dainty Convent-taught stitchery--"J. M. de B."

He would have cried out, but the cry stuck in his throat, and a
chilly sweat broke out upon and bathed him.  He had glanced toward
the corner occupied by the truckle-bed whereon my Cousin Boisset had
lain.  Covered with a sheet dyed partly red, something long and stark
and still lay outstretched upon the palliasse.  And a lance driven
home to the shaft stuck upright in the body, from whose drained-out
veins the last drops splashed heavily into a dreadful pool that
slowly widened on the stone-flagged kitchen floor.

Something snapped in P. C. Breagh's brain at that sight.  His
under-jaw wrenched to one side and dropped idiotically.  He yelped
out wildly the name of his Infanta, and went on yelping, and could
not stop:

"Juliette!  Juliette!  Where are you?  What have they done?...  Oh,
Juliette!..."

And then the piercing agony of his loss and the certainty of a fate
of nameless horror for her, were lost in an immense relief.
Underneath the bed of death something moved and rustled.  The slender
thread of a voice replied:

"Monsieur Breagh, I am here!  Do not be so alarmed, I beg of you!
Terrible things have happened, but I am not hurt at all!"

And the ensanguined pall was pushed aside and the little figure crept
out from its hiding-place.  Dust and cobwebs could not dim her in the
eyes of her true worshiper.  He choked and made a dive to help her,
stumbled and fell upon his knees as she rose to hers.  And then she
was in his arms, not clinging to him, but leaning against his broad
chest, and shivering as though she were perishing cold.  And through
the chattering of her teeth he heard--did he really hear her falter:

"I knew--I knew that you would come!  When a priest had been found to
bless the grave of my father.  Not before!...  You would never have
returned before!"

Her faith in him filled him with a joy that was anguish.  He rose up,
lifting her toward the light, but not at all releasing her.

"I came as soon as I had done my best to keep that promise.  Shall I
ever forget what I felt when I set my foot in at the door?...  Oh,
Lord!...  Ten million times worse than when that luckless Angéle
poisoned me!...  Didn't I make sure you were dead or worse than dead!"

"It is he who is dead!"  She drew her small, cold hands from his that
were as icy, and went to the bed and turned back the upper end of the
sheet that covered the still form.  "Monsieur Breagh, you look upon a
noble soldier, who gave his life for me," she said proudly, and
showed the snow-white face of my Cousin Boisset.

"Wouldn't I die for you?  If I got the chance!...  Don't you know
it?...  No--how can you know it?"

Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at
him to say:

"I do know it!  To-day you placed yourself between me and the
violence of those Prussians.  I have no words to thank you for your
courage, sir!  Had I words for _him_"--she looked back at my
"cousin"--"he would not hear them....  Nor can he be sensible of
this----"  She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the
boldly arching eyebrows.  "Yet with all my gratitude I place it
there!"

P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would
change places with him to get that--and I believe you know it!  Cover
him up and let me take you away from here...."  He added, as she
looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be
safe.  There must be somewhere!"

"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here
than anywhere.  You do not think the comrades of those savage men who
made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a
plundered nest?"

"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this--beastliness."

His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.

She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep
red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:

"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a
shed,' where Madame kept her firewood.  We will hide ourselves in
there until the dark.  For what are you looking?"

He answered, stirring the _débris_ on the flagstones:

"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack.  No!...
Except the rags of a spare jacket--they've left me nothing but this."

One stout clasped notebook had suffered little.  He thrust it into
his pocket and turned to Juliette.  She said, with a rueful catch of
the breath as she regarded the wreckage of her own property:

"Me they have not left anything at all of luggage.  The little
_portemanteau_ and the _sac de nuit_ I brought with me from Belgium
... behold their contents destroyed by those most wicked men!  Is it
not deplorable?  Pray look, Monsieur!"

But Monsieur, suddenly seized by an attack of ultra-British prudery,
had turned away to rummage in the corner of a cupboard, where
perchance might lurk a loaf.

Nothing was there but a little knitted white shawl, which Juliette
recognized as her own, and claimed gladly....  She threw it about her
head and shoulders, and they passed out cautiously together by Madame
Guyot's back door, as destitute a young couple as ever tramped.  But
not before Juliette de Bayard had replaced the sheet over the face of
the dead gunner, and sprinkled it with holy water from a crockery
stoup that hung above the bed.

"He was so good....  He should now be safe in Paradise.  But we must
always remember him in our prayers!..."


It would not have been wise to move about, but they could talk in
whispers, partly buried in the heap of clean dry dead leaves filling
half of the lean-to.  Thus P. C. Breagh learned the story of the
death of my Cousin Boisset, and told in return his own tale.

"You had departed, it might be one-half hour, when a man came running
down the street, who cried: 'Hide!  Run!  The Uhlans are coming!
They have plundered the Château Malakoff, and drunk M. Bénoit's _eau
de vie_ and wine!'

"This Château Malakoff is the house of a rich peasant whose vineyards
have suffered much by the German guns.  You will remember Madame
Guyot saying so, and M. Boisset responding, full of gaiety, 'He will
get all the better prices, my cousin, for the old vintages he has in
store!'  Naturally the outcry made much confusion, one peasant
running this way and one that....  Madame Guyot caught hold of me and
would have forced me to accompany her, saying that in the quarries
beyond the village would be found a refuge.  But I refused to leave
the house!"

He broke in:

"Think what you risked!  Why didn't you escape with her?"

She looked at him wonderingly:

"Why, do you ask me? ... Had I not given you my _parole_ to stay?"

He could not speak.  She went on quickly:

"So I said: 'I will remain, wearing my brassard of the Croix Rouge,
and the Prussians will take me for the nurse of M. Boisset.'  But
when Madame and the villagers had gone, hearing the galloping of
horses approaching and a howling as of wolves, that brave soldier
said to me: 'Mademoiselle, when men like these are mad with wine,
they care nothing for the Red Cross!  Cover me over with a sheet, and
hide underneath the bed I lie on.  Thus they will think me dead, and
possibly go away.  The good God may let me save you, though I have
often sinned against Him!'"

A tear brimmed over and fell on her white cheek.  She brushed it off
and went on:

"I obeyed, Monsieur; I locked the door, taking out the key and hiding
it.  Then I covered M. Boisset with the sheet, took a crucifix from
the wall, and laid it on his breast.  Then I got under the bed, for I
heard men at the door.  There was the 'tinc' of spurs and the sound
of breathing.  Then heavy blows struck on the door until the lock
gave way....  They entered....  Monsieur Breagh, that noble man had
said to me, '_For your life, do not make a sound!_'  For my soul,
more precious than life, I could not have spoken or moved!..."

Above the narrow band of black velvet that clipped it, P. C. Breagh
could see her little throat swelling.  Her tragic eyes seemed to have
no room for him.  He waited, possessed by a strange hazy feeling that
this meeting with her amidst surroundings so frightful must be taking
place in a dream of uncanny vividness.  That he must wake up next
moment in the clean spare bedroom of the gardener's cottage, to find
his garments, cleansed of soil and stain, brushed and repaired by the
deft hands of the charitable Sisters, and a battered tin bath of
genuinely hot water, waiting to receive the Englishman.....

"They came in," said Juliette, "talking in their guttural language.
Me, I could never learn more than ten words of German at school....
But I comprehended that they were angry at finding so little in the
cupboards and closets of my poor Madame Guyot.  That was why they
tore up clothes and linen--broke the dishes and glasses--behaved as
wild beasts, rather than men.  That they were drunk, I knew, though I
saw their boots and not their faces.  The smell of wine and brandy
made me desire to be sick....  But when they approached the bed, with
what anguish of apprehension I waited....  If I could have screamed,
it would have been in that moment, when they pulled back the
sheet...."

Her eyelids shuddered over trembling eyeballs.  Her nostrils quivered
with each sharply-taken breath.  Her tragic upper lip shut down upon
its neighbor as though it would never relax in smiles again:

"I heard my own heart beat--so loud it was like thunder.  I felt M.
Boisset trying to hold the breath....  I prayed to the Mother of God
to cover us with Her _manteau_.  I think she has certainly heard me
when the Uhlans put back the sheet....  Alas, how terribly I am to
find myself mistaken!  When the Uhlan moves from the bed I believe he
is about to go.  Then--there is a savage cry!--a groan, hollow and
terrible....  The lance comes plunging through the body of M.
Boisset, through the palliasse--through the sacking that is
underneath--through the sleeve of my dress, which is soaked with
blood....  See!..."

And she drew out a fold of the loose sleeve, and showed the rent made
by the steel in it and the wet red patches fast drying into brownish
stains.  And he who saw could only choke out, as his brows scowled
and his yellow-flecked eyes burned tigerishly:

"The brutes!...  The cowardly beggars!  Oh, if I had only been there!"

"Of what use?" she said.  "They would only have killed you!"

"An Englishman," he blustered: "I'd like to have had them try!  Why,
we're neutral.  No Germans would dare----"

She said, bending her great black brows upon him, and sternly drawing
down her upper lip:

"Monsieur, they would have killed you, as they killed my father.
They have no pity, these men with panther hearts.  How should they,
when he has none--that soldier-Minister whom Germany worships to
idolatry.  Contradict me--say that I am wrong--to convince me would
be impossible.  For I read the soul of Count Bismarck when I looked
him in the face."

For the owner of the domineering voice that had roused her from her
stupor of misery was for Juliette de Bayard a very Moloch, ravenous
for flesh of men, insatiable in thirst for blood.  And comprehending
this, P. C. Breagh put forth no plea for a more tolerant judgment of
his erstwhile hero, beyond lamely saying:

"He's a great man--a terribly great man, however you look at him.
And he--do you know, he saved my life once!"

She said, with her deeply cut nostrils swelling and quivering:

"Our Lord will say to him upon the Day of Judgment, 'You saved this
one.  How many others have you given to death?'"

Then, as P. C. Breagh winced at the brief, semi-contemptuous 'This
one,' Juliette healed the wound with one gentle glance.  The delicate
voice crept to his sore heart soothingly:

"But for that rescue, I should now be quite alone in my great misery.
I think that God permitted it, knowing this day upon its way to me."

P. C. Breagh said, tingling all over:

"Do you really believe that?..."

She answered simply and directly:

"If I did not, I would not say it....  Now I will shut my eyes and
rest a little.  I am so very tired, me!"

And she leaned back with lowered lashes on her rustling pillow of
last year's dead leaves.  He asked himself what had she not gone
through on this day, poor fragile, tender child!

Had the news of her father's death been brought to her in London or
Paris, there would have been closed doors, a darkened chamber for the
mourner, the presence of some well-loved consoler, the counsel of her
director, the silent sympathy of understanding friends.

But here, where every custom and conventionality was suspended or
shattered--where human life was bared to the bedrock by the furious
struggle of nations in War, she had sought for a wounded warrior, to
find a bloody corpse amidst a jumble of other corpses, and returned
from that overwhelming experience to sit with strangers at a
peasant's board.

No wonder Juliette was very tired.  Would her reason suffer from the
results of this shock?  Would she droop and die of the horrors
undergone?  Was it possible that in a body so frail there dwelt an
indomitable and unconquerable spirit?  It had looked out of her stern
eyes, it had sat upon her lips when she had spoken of the Iron
Chancellor.

Even as P. C. Breagh leaned toward the small white face, brooding
over it, breathlessly studying it, she opened sapphire eyes upon him,
to say, with the suddenness of a child:

"I have been told that the Crown Prince of Prussia is good and has a
noble nature.  Do you not think that if he knew how wickedly those
Uhlans have killed the poor M. Boisset he would without mercy have
them shot?"

P. C. Breagh, caught staring, confusedly opined so.  She said, her
heavy eyelids weighed down with drowsiness:

"They were cowards, for they took the alarm and mounted and rode away
calling that the Franzosen were coming....  Yet when they had gone
and I crept out from my concealment, what do you imagine is all that
I view?  In effect, nothing more terrible than an old, bent,
white-haired priest in a ragged soutane, who was walking through the
village saying his Rosary...."

She went on, as P. C. Breagh pricked his ears, and opened his eyes
widely:

"He looked so good and like the pictures of the holy Curé d'Ars, for
whose intercession I had been praying, that I cried to him: 'Help, my
Father!  Help for one dying!  Help for another in misery!'  But he
must have been less holy than he looked, or very deaf, for he passed
on.  Then I crept back under the bed, and then--at last, you came to
me.  What should I have done if you had not come, Monsieur?..."

For once Carolan did not hear her.  His thoughts were busy elsewhere.
He was asking himself if the old priest in the patched cassock who
had shown himself to Juliette, could be the Curé who had read the
Office at the grave of de Bayard?

And if that priest were mortal man, how had he covered the distance
between the battlefield and Petit Plappeville, and what had scared
the drunken marauders from their prey?  And was it not strange that
the resemblance to the saint of Ars had appealed to both Carolan and
Juliette?...  The problem must remain unsolved for all Time, it might
be.

Yet this fact had stamped itself on P. C. Breagh's consciousness,
deeply as his own heavy nailed boots had bitten into the clay by the
Colonel's graveside.  On the moist surface of the spot where the
Servant of Heaven had been standing, the clumsy iron-buckled,
wooden-soled shoes had left no print at all.


An interesting illusion, bred of the exaltation of the senses under
emotion, produced in part, says my friend the Physiologist, by
subconscious Memory.  A significant phenomenon, remarks my other
friend, the student of Psychology, testifying to the thinness of the
Veil dividing the Visible World from the Unseen.  While my Catholic
terms it a rare but not isolated or uncommon revelation, pointing the
stupendous truth contained in that clause of the _Credo_ referring to
the Communion of Saints and illustrating the dynamic force of Prayer.




LIX

Juliette breathed so evenly, and lay so long without moving, that P.
C. Breagh believed her asleep.  Twilight showed nothing but a black
shape, vaguely feminine, a pale oval patch represented her face....

Suddenly as before, her eyes opened and met his.  She said, following
up some previous train of thought:

"It is nobler than the portraits, and yet more pitiless.  I speak of
the face of my country's enemy....  See you well, Monsieur Breagh ...
if I were Our Lady, I would never rise from my knees until Our Lord
had saved France!..."

"What would save France?" Carolan asked her.  She answered, turning
in her rustling couch of leaves:

"Death, striking the hand that slowly strangles her....  Death,
freezing the brain that plans her fall....  Death, overtaking the
merciless giver of Death to her children....  Nothing else could now
save France!..."

He who heard was dumb, knowing that this harping was the very note of
madness.  She went on, speaking with somber earnestness:

"Always is it that women are accused by men of weakness.  Frenchwomen
are, in addition, termed 'timid and frivolous.'  Yet France has twice
been saved by the courage of her daughters....  Remember the holy
Jeanne d'Arc, beloved of God and Our Lady ... and Charlotte Corday
also, Monsieur!--the courageous citizeness of Caen....  At school I
learned her words, spoken before the Revolutionary Tribunal....
'_Me, I have slain one man to save a hundred thousand!..._'  Why has
not France a Charlotte Corday now?"

There was something in her tone that menaced like the flicker of
lightning, seen through a rent in stormy wrack.  That a creature so
frail and slender should dream of heroic vengeance was incredible.
One would have expected it from a heroine of the Krimhilde-Brünhilde
type.  To divert her from the dangerous theme by changing the
conversation was impossible.  The only thing to do was to feign to
doze.

He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut
his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire.  Oblivion
descended on him.  Pretense became reality.  He sank into a very gulf
of sleep.


Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was
wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the
deepening dusk.  Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock
claimed her as a victim.  She was far more near to madness than
Carolan had dreamed.

It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent
contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black
silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows
and ravines.  Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the
southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest
sculpturesque shapes....  An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure
on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks,
bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect;
lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of
genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of
cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.

But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a
heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and
cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war.  In other vaporous
pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from
some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes
counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.

Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure,
slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist.  And the
watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of
Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.

He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a
pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy....  He ate at a
daïs-table in a banqueting hall--she served him a golden cup of wine
iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the
frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains....  He
dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept
near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.

The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the
eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils.  The wind had
fallen, the silence was profound and awful.  She shuddered, thinking
of the battlefield....

What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet?  What of the
thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches?  What of the
myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?

Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life
from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the
trodden fields?  Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips,
and point at him with their rigid fingers?  Would they know, in
Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them?  In Hell they would be
sure to know, because their murderer would be there....

"_Ting...._"

What was that faint approaching sound, drawing nearer and nearer
through the darkness, that banished the haunting, dreadful images
that crowded in her brain?  It loosed the iron band that was bound
about her aching temples.  It melted the icy armor that was riveted
about her torn and sorrowful heart....

"_Ting-ting!_"

She turned her head to the quarter whence it came, and listened,
breathing quickly.  Again came the silvern tinkle.

"_Ting-ting-ting! ..._"

Now the sound of heavy approaching footsteps came with it, and Fear
fell from her like a pall all snow-wet.  She rose up among the
rustling dead leaves, bent, laid her hand on the shoulder of the
sleeper, and roused him cautiously.  He awakened, and said through
the fingers she laid in caution on his lips:

"Who is it?..."  And then instantly remembered, and passionately
kissed the warning hand.

"_Ting-ting, ting-ting!..._"

"Do you hear, Monsieur?" she panted.

She snatched away the hand.  He rose to his knees and listened....
Dawn, creeping into the hovel, painted their hands and faces gray.
White teeth flashed in the gray of his, as he said to her joyfully:

"It is a priest, with the Blessed Sacrament!"

No more was said.  They took hands and went out of the hovel, and
passed round and through the little flowery front yard into the
littered street of Petit Plappeville.

At its upper end two black figures, encircled by the yellow halo of a
lantern-flame, moved toward them.  Their shadows were thrown sidewise
upon the littered road and the whitewashed garden walls.  The bell
tinkled, telling of the coming of Him Who is the Light of the World.
The wheezing of someone troubled with asthma accompanied the clumping
of wooden-soled country shoes.

Presently came in sight an old woman in sabots, carrying an immense
umbrella, and a huge and antique lantern with horn slides.  The stout
figure of an elderly priest followed her, covered with a biretta,
wearing a wide black mantle, and walking at a slow and decent pace.

At intervals he tinkled the small hand bell he carried in his left
hand.  His right arm was folded over his breast.  As Juliette sank
down in the dry dust, her companion hesitated an instant, then knelt
down beside the girl.

The priest stopped as he neared the kneeling pair, and blessed them
in silence.  His round face looked puckered and anxious.  He said, as
his glance took in the bareheaded young man and the slender young
woman, and their environment of ruin and desolation:

"My children, are you the only living creatures remaining in this
unhappy village?"

Juliette was praying.  P. C. Breagh answered in a reverent whisper:

"Yes, my Father.  The Prussian horsemen came, and the villagers left
their houses....  There was a wounded soldier in the cottage of
Madame Guyot.  He feigned to be dead, and the Uhlans ran him through
with one of their lances.  He lies within there!  May his soul rest
in peace!"

The priest solemnly raised the Host, and blessed the house of death.
Then he said to Carolan and Juliette:

"It will be best that you should follow me to the place where I am
going.  A person lies there in extremity, to whom I carry Our Lord.
Your presence will be something of an additional protection, in case
any of these foreign soldiers should offer insult to Him I bear."

He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered
with the wreckage of humble households.  The old woman in sabots
preceded him, assiduously lighting his path.  And the boy and girl
came after the priest, walking side by side decorously.  But
presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.

"_Ting!_"

They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter
morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the
bonds of Death.  The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving
fragrance.  Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through
their veins smoothly as new milk.  Presently the old woman who walked
before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary.  They answered,
murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.

Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was
setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background
of translucent silvery hue.  A broad band of primrose-yellow banding
the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak.  Above, there
hung one star of blazing emerald.

When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended
upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian
watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the
low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea.  Upon the left rose the
ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden.  Steps rose to an
archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered
in.

"_Ting!_"

As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway.
He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a
strained and anxious look.  He bent the knee and crossed himself,
then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps.  His wild eyes
questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the
lantern-bearer.  He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said
to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his
companions:

"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here.
Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than
one light!"

Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a
sort of rustic flower stand.  The candle wax had guttered all down
one side, making what old women call a winding sheet.  He glanced at
this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine.  Then he moved
forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine
bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own
boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes.  The huge sabots of Mère
Catherine made short work of the splinters.  Following in her
Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.

A long, low house rose up before them.  Its rows of barred basement
windows indicated an extensive cellarage.  Many of the windows were
broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off.
Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose
trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and
everywhere.  And as a slight sound of astonishment came from
Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered
after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence
was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said
to her in a whisper:

"This is the Château Malakoff.  Perhaps you remember?...  And all
those broken bottles....  The soldiers drank the wine...."

Then she hung her old white-capped head, and hurried after the
Father, finishing the last decade of the Rosary as she went.
Juliette and Breagh would have waited in the square hall on which the
front door opened, but from the landing immediately above the aster
of the house looked back frowning, and imperatively beckoned them to
ascend.

They went upstairs.

The door of the death chamber stood open.  From within, came the
murmuring sound of the priest's voice.  Red-eyed servants knelt in
prayer about the threshold.  The master of the house was just within
the door.  His square black head and vigorous shoulders looked angry
and wrathful.  Old Catherine whispered to Juliette as she beckoned
her to kneel beside her:

"It is his wife, Madame Bénoit....  They were only married a year!"

Then she clashed her great Rosary and joined in the prayers
vigorously, while the thin crying of a baby in an adjoining chamber
pierced the sudden, deep, profound silence that fell upon all present
when the priest elevated the Host.  A little later she broke down
again, and hissed in Juliette's ear that Madame was dying, that the
baby had been born too soon, because the mother had been frightened
by the Prussians ... that M. le Curé would give the Holy Oils after
administering the Viaticum.  And then in a gray pool of quiet that
ensued some moments later, a woman's voice cried out with
astonishment and terror and anger in it:

"_Mon mari!...  Mon mari!...  Au secours!...  Les Prussiens----_"

And the cry broke off short with a horrible suddenness; there was a
momentary confusion, and then the priest came out, looking stern and
sorrowful.  He opened the door widely, beckoning in several of the
women.  And Juliette, rising to make way for him, saw the wavering
flames of tapers burning on either side of a Crucifix on a
white-draped table, and the figure of the house master, with a face
of ashen grayness turned toward her, leaning over a white bed,
clasping something even whiter in a desperate embrace.  Only two
great hair plaits that flowed over the bosom of the dead woman
glittered like solid bands of burnished copper in the wavering
candlelight.  And Dawn crept in through the open window, with the
scent of the crushed and trampled roses, and the smell of wine
spilled and staling, and the uneasy twittering of frightened birds.

And then--they were picking their way over the broken glass-covered
gravel walk, and the priest, released from the obligation of silence,
was eagerly asking for more particulars of the death of my Cousin
Boisset.

"For the villagers of Petit Plappeville are hiding in the quarry of
Seulvent.  They will not return until the Prussians have left the
neighborhood; they have learned what they have to expect from these
men when they are full of wine....  We will stop as we pass, and tell
them what has happened....  Then you had better come back with me to
my presbytery.  The soldiers have not left us much, but there will be
coffee and bread!"

"But for me," said Mère Catherine, clumping along stoutly, "there
would not be even bread and coffee.  But I have my hiding holes of
which I tell nobody.  And as Monsieur le Curé did not know, he could
not say where they were!"

That was a pleasant meal in the little deal-shelved study that had
somehow escaped when the presbytery was turned upside down.  It stood
next the church, a little ancient plain stone building with a square
belfry tower and a spire covered in with blackened slating, and two
recumbent effigies of the twelfth century, that were dear to the good
Curé's heart.  After _déjeuner_ he explained that he was going to
visit these treasured relics for the purpose of ascertaining whether
they had suffered damage at the Germans' hands.

He carried a basket with him when he trotted away on his errand.  P.
C. Breagh, as he leaned by the open casement of the little
ground-floor study, rather wondered why it should contain a corked
bottle and a biggish loaf of bread.

Juliette had gone to help Catherine restore order in the kitchen.
The young man's hand was in his trousers pocket as he wondered,
staring after the stout retreating figure in its cassock of rusty
black.  Suddenly he uttered an exclamation, and pulled out the hand
with something shining in it.  The piece of gold given him by
Juliette.

He put a hand on the sill, and was out at the window in time to see
the priest unlock the heavy sunken door that led into the belfry
tower, and vanish into the dusk of the sacred place.  He followed, to
find the Curé struggling with a heavy ladder that led up to a trap
hole in the huge-beamed, plastered ceiling of the belfry--a ladder
that was evidently seldom shifted from its cobwebbed place against
the whitewashed wall.

"Couldn't I do that?  I'm a good deal stronger than, you are....
Halloa!...  Lucky I was there!"

P. C. Breagh had thoughtlessly spoken in English, and the priest, who
had not seen him enter, had nearly dropped the ladder.  He said quite
reproachfully, as the young man caught and steadied the ponderous bit
of timber:

"Why have you followed me?  Is it that you wish to speak to me
privately?  If so, pray do not do so in your English, which is
sufficiently like German to give me an unpleasant agitation of the
nerves!"

P. C. Breagh explained, exhibiting the golden coin, that it had been
given him by Mademoiselle to secure a Mass.

"But certainly she shall have a Mass.  Though five francs will be
more than sufficient.  Retain the coin, Monsieur, until I can find
the necessary francs of change.  You see, we are poor in this
neighborhood ... it is to be expected!"  The good Curé smiled, and
added: "As you see me, I am rich compared with many of my
_confrères_--even richer than some of my superiors.  Therefore, if
you will describe to me the features of the priest who read the
Office, it may be arranged with more propriety that he shall offer
Mass."  He added, seeing the young man hesitate: "Recall his
features.  Describe his person, if you can!" ...

P. C. Breagh recalled and described.  When he had done, the Curé
said, in a tone of quiet conviction:

"That priest will not need Mademoiselle's five francs! ... And he is
not only my superior....  He ranks above the angels....  Monsieur has
spoken face to face with a glorious Saint of God!"

Something like an electric shock tingled from the roots of P. C.
Breagh's hair down his spine, and passed out by way of his heels into
the worn flagstones.  He tried to speak, but his palate and tongue
were stiff.  The priest went on:

"Upon earth he was the Curé of Ars.  As a Catholic, Monsieur has
learned of him.  But that he foretold this War, possibly Monsieur
does not know?...  A year before his holy death....  Since it has
happened ... this War that the holy Curé prophesied, he has revisited
the earthly places where he prayed and labored and suffered....  He
has succored the wounded....  He has appeared, just as he was when
alive, to the dying, and cheered and consoled them so that they have
departed in joy and peace....  In the world this will not be
credited.  It does not matter!...  What matters is, that those who
perhaps asked the Saint of Ars to intercede for them in their hour of
desperate need have received proof that in heaven, where he now
dwells, he is still what he would have wished to be: a worker on
behalf of souls....  He said this to me, twelve years ago, with that
smile that the good God had given him, to make poor doubters sure
that He Himself will one day smile on them in heaven----"

He stopped and wiped his face with a handkerchief that was
unaffectedly a blue duster, and, noticing the sweat that had started
on the other's face, interrupted himself to cry:

"But Monsieur is still holding that heavy ladder!...  How could I be
so forgetful!...  No! it is not to be replaced against the wall.  It
is to be attached by the rings in the uprights to those hooks at the
edge of that trap-door....  Since Monsieur has been favored with a
vision of the Saint of Ars, he is worthy of all trust and confidence.
Let Monsieur but fix the ladder while I turn the key in the door, and
then he shall see a pigeon that I keep in the belfry tower!"

And the good man bustled to the door and locked it, and then came
back to test the steadiness of the ladder, and mounted with asthmatic
wheezings and much display of darned socks and venerable carpet
slippers, and tapped three times at the trapdoor.

It was lifted at the signal, and P. C. Breagh beheld the gaunt and
sunburnt face of a French Cuirassier, peering down out of the gloom
of the spire that was faintly lighted by delicate lines of morning
sunshine, gilding the upper edges of the shingle boards that roofed
it in.

"Thanks, thanks, my Father!" the Cuirassier muttered, as the bottle
of coffee and the loaf were handed up into his eager, shaking hands.

"Did you sleep?" the priest asked him, and the soldier answered in
the affirmative, adding that he had been awakened by footsteps in the
church below him at the earliest break of day.

Said the Curé:

"My child, it was I.  A member of my parish was dying--I came to the
church to take the Blessed Sacrament from the Tabernacle....  I
forgot that you would probably awaken and suppose that your presence
here had been betrayed!...  But all is well! and a cart of brushwood
will stop before the presbytery this evening and carry more than its
load when it is driven on.  It is going to a farm near Audun--from
there you will be able to escape into Luxembourg, and from thence
rejoin the Army when your wounds are sufficiently healed.  It is said
that the Army of Châlons, with the Duke of Magenta and the Emperor,
now marches north from Rheims toward Sedan."  He added as white teeth
flashed in the dark face, and the sullen eyes gleamed scornfully:
"You will please yourself as to serving again!  You have already
suffered greatly for our country!"

The soldier said roughly:

"I would die for her with a good heart!...  But I will not fight
again for this Emperor and his Marshal, by whom France has been sold
and betrayed!"

"Well, well!...  _Au revoir_, my child, and may Our Lord protect
you," said the priest, sighing and beginning a puffing retreat down
the ladder.  "Shut the trapdoor down carefully, keep perfect silence,
and remember that it is very dangerous to smoke.  The curls of vapor
can be seen rising between the shingles.  I observed it when we had
workmen here in Spring!"

Then he descended, and with P. C. Breagh's aid put back the ladder,
unlocked the belfry tower door, and they went out into the clear
bright autumn air.

"That soldier came last night," the Curé whispered, as they stopped
to lock the door with the heavy iron key that was corroded with rust
where use did not maintain its brightness.  "He was taken prisoner in
yesterday's battle, found to be wounded, disarmed, and left to shift
for himself, with others in the same condition.  One of them--in
whose company this man was--had concealed a pistol, and had the
daring to attempt the life of M. de Bismarck--or General Moltke--I am
not sure which!  But the shot missed its mark, and instantly all
those who had seen it fired, with others who knew nothing, were
massacred in cold blood.  This man by a miracle--escaped!...  How, I
know not!  He says he fell into a pit full of dead, and lay there
expecting to be buried with them, until the darkness came to cover
his resurrection from the grave."

They went back into the presbytery.  The priest went to look for the
fifteen francs of change out of Juliette's gold piece.  She came out
of the kitchen, from which Catherine's bedroom opened, and showed
herself freshly laved, and attired in spotless neatness, her face no
longer swollen with weeping and weariness, her superb hair brushed to
dull cloudy silkiness, and newly coiled upon the summit of her little
queenly head.

Her eyes shone brilliant and hard as blue jewels, as she said to her
friend in a low, vibrating tone of excitement:

"Mère Catherine says that yesterday a French prisoner tried to shoot
M. de Bismarck, and nearly succeeded....  See you well, I would like
to meet that man!"

"Why, Mademoiselle?"

"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"

He regarded her in silence.  She went on almost with hardihood,
throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed
between their narrowed lids.

"See you well--if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to
the man who saved France!"

Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist
came before his sight.  Through it he was aware of long eyes that
gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that
pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh....  He saw that the underlip
was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper
disclosed teeth as white as curd....  Then he heard the silver voice
say with a sigh in it:

"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty.  Ah, Monsieur, if I but
were!..."

She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers.  As the
amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw
thrust out savagely, she thought:

"There is something of my mother in me--more than a little!  How
dared I scorn her--I, who can speak and look like this?"  And she
repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I
but were!"

For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me.  When the first Woman
bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump
of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its
nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she
remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher
of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of
men.

This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her
earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.

Meanwhile Breagh saw nothing but the little red mouth with the subtly
wooing smile on it ... the gleaming jewels that were shadowed by
their covert of black lashes....  Her will bent heavily on his,
weakened by his worship of her.  In another instant he would have
asked what she wanted him to do.

But the heavy footsteps of the priest, clumping on the little crazy
stair, recalled Breagh from the rapids toward which he had been
drifting.  In another moment the Curé came into the room.  He had a
knotted blue handkerchief in his hand, which weighed somewhat
heavily.  He said with a good-humored smile as he untied one of the
knots, and took out a little pile of silver:

"Here behold my savings bank!  Your fifteen francs, Mademoiselle!"

He was earnest to count them out and return them to her, and she was
as earnest that the coins should not be given back....  But she could
not deny her poverty when the good man charged her with it, saying:

"Accept the return of this money as a mortification salutary for the
health of your soul!"

Then he tied up the handkerchief and stuffed it away under his
cassock, and asked them:

"Where are you journeying together, my children?  I have a reason for
wishing to know!"

He had turned to P. C. Breagh, still thrilling with the memory of
that strange look Juliette had cast upon him.  The young man
answered, glowing through his sunbrown:

"Wherever Mademoiselle de Bayard is desirous to go!"

The Curé pursed his mouth and turned to Juliette; and then sabots
clumped in the passage, and a cracked voice cried from the door:

"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more
'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and
folks by their right names!"

There was a terrible pause.  Juliette was enduring agonies.  The Curé
pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed
spectacles.  Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:

"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old
friend's only son.  She told me that when we were washing up the
coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there....  When the Prussians came
to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother.  '_To
celebrate my marriage,_' she told me, '_because M. What's-his-name
was there!_'"

P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the
stomach.  His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly.
His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was
utterance.  "_Married!..._" kept on ticking inside his head.
"_Married!..._"  and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper
of a tolling bell.  "_You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the
time!_"

His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so
wooingly.  It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath
their heavy fringes of black.  The eyebrows were knitted, the pale
lips set rigidly.  The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked,
plump and plain:

"You are really married?  My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving
herself?"

Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and
raised clear, sorrowful eyes.

"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage.  Now that I
have returned, I shall await my husband here in France.  My father
esteemed him highly.  He is M. Charles Tessier.  He lives in the Rue
de Provence, in the town of Versailles."

Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined
to ask.  We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle
had crashed into dust and brickbats.  One glance at his face, sharp
as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and
sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought.  But if he had
seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied
again, defiantly.  Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed
so....  She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of
Charles Tessier.  Ah, Heaven!...  The thought was more unwelcome than
ever it had been.

Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave
young Englishman.  Would he have been in such haste to break his
daughter's heart?...  And--ah, Heaven!--again, if this burning of her
boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?

He was so simple, and Juliette adored simplicity.  He was so
straightforward and honest, one could not guard the heart.  When he
had thought her dead, how piteously he had cried to her, "Juliette!
Juliette!..."  When she had crept from under the bed the lance had
plunged through, barely missing her, and Breagh had dived at her and
caught her up and hugged her, despite her terror and misery, she had
known a wonderful thrill....

"Mine!" those fierce young arms conveyed, as they had strained her to
his broad breast.  Was it wicked, was it unnatural in one so newly
bereaved of the noblest and dearest of all fathers, to have been
taken by storm in those moments of desolation--to have dreamed since
then of the rapture of being able to answer: "Yes, yes!...  If our
very own!...  Never anyone's but yours...."?


Alas! if Juliette had been unnatural in yielding to such thoughts,
was she not now punished?  She had dealt with her own slight arm the
blow that had shattered the fabric of her dreams as well as his....
She would never again see that light in the eyes of Monica's brother;
never--against all the accepted traditions ruling the pre-matrimonial
affairs of a young French girl of good family--be hugged in that
rude, possessive, British way.  But what loneliness, what terror,
what danger had driven her into the arms that enfolded....  Besides,
she would atone by marrying Charles Tessier.  A tepid future passed
by the side of the young cloth manufacturer extended before her....
She could not restrain a shudder at the thought, even while she
mentally renewed her vow that, for the sake of him who had planned
it, she would embrace such a future with resignation....  It flashed
upon her now, with blinding clearness, that not only must the future
be embraced, but the man....

"_Tear the picture....  Forget the dream!_"  The words; of de
Bayard's letter came back to her.

Ah, well!--she had done with pictures and dreams....  For her,
realities.  The comrade looked as though Reality had hit him
smashingly.  She barely recognized his cheerful voice as he answered
to some leading question put by the Curé:

"I am ready and willing to act as escort to Madame.  It would be
risky for her to attempt to return alone to Versailles."

She tried to meet his sorrowful gray eyes and succeeded.  She bent
her little head and said with an admirable assumption of newly wedded
dignity:

"Monsieur Breagh is very amiable.  I will accept his offer with
gratitude.  When my husband learns of his great goodness, he too will
thank him.  Alas! at this moment my poor Charles is far away!..."

She sought for a tear, and found more than she had expected.  For a
whole thunderstorm of big, bright drops burst from those wonderful
eyes.

She fell into a Windsor armchair polished by the worthy Curé's stout
person, and dropped her arms upon the table, and her head on them,
and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed....  The priest beckoned Breagh from the
study.  They were going to make arrangements for the journey.
Horrible Mère Catherine, cause of all the misery, came and cackled
over the prone, abandoned head....  Madame was going to start early
to-morrow morning....  Allowing for the disorganization of the
railway service, Madame would reach Versailles by noon of the same
day.  The husband of Madame would presently arrive to find her
waiting for him.  Heaven would shed blessings on their joyous
reunion.  Let Madame take her occasion of soliciting the patronage of
St. Christopher, patron of all travelers.  The first little male
cherub that should bless the union of Madame and Monsieur would
naturally be christened by the name of the good Saint.




LX

They drove in a country cart to Etain over roads bestrewn for the
most part with the _débris_ of the falling Empire, and there caught a
train starting for Verdun.  It was crammed with wounded French
soldiers lying on straw in trucks and horse boxes.  Women jostled one
another at the doors of these, to supply the poor sufferers with soup
and fruit, bread and coffee.  The news of the retirement of Bazaine
upon Metz was in every mouth, although, thanks to the cutting by
Uhlans of the telegraph line between Metz and Thionville, the Emperor
did not receive the Marshal's wire until the 22nd.

The Warlock had lost no time.  Already the blockade of the doomed
fortress city was so far completed that only the most daring French
scouts were able to worm their way through the enemy's investing
lines.

For, even as the octopus, desirous of increasing his family, throws
off a spare tentacle which becomes another octopus, from the First
and Second Armies of United Germany had been evolved a Fourth Army of
Six Corps under the command of the Crown Prince of Saxony, whose
Advance of Guard Cavalry were already over the Meuse.

The Army of the Prussian Crown Prince had traversed the roads south
of Toul and entered the basin of the Ornain.  The King of Prussia,
with Bismarck and Moltke, had started to march on Paris through the
dusty white plains of Champagne.

His Great Headquarters had already reached Bar-le-Duc.  One of his
scouting squadrons of Uhlans had captured a French courier at
Commercy.  Thus Moltke had learned that the mounted regiments of
Canrobert's Corps had been left behind at the Camp of Châlons, and
that Paris was being placed in a state of defense to resist an
investment expected hourly.

On this very day the vast Camp had been abandoned, the Imperial
pavilions, the mess houses, officers' quarters and kitchens were
blazing merrily, the lines of rustic baraques usually occupied by the
troops were marked out by crackling hedges of fire.  While MacMahon,
at his camp near Rheims, was torn between Ministerial orders
emanating from the Empress, insisting on the immediate relief of
Bazaine, and his own conviction that the order of march should be
back by the directest route to defend the menaced capital.

Said the Man of Iron to Roon, whiffing a huge cigar as the steady
downpour of rain swirled down the gutters and drenched the Bodyguard
on duty outside the King's Headquarters at Bar-le-Duc:

"We barricade the straight road that leads to Metz.  Will the fellow
face the risks of a circuitous march leading him near the Belgian
frontier?  I should be personally obliged to him to decide
quickly....  One does not desire to linger in a Capua as dismal as
this."

Bismarck-Böhlen brought him a telegram.  He was about to open it when
the Warlock hastily entered the sitting room that served as
ante-chamber, flourishing a copy of _Le Temps_, issued in Paris on
the previous day.

"A Uhlan of the Advance has got me this paper.  He took it from the
person of a respectable bourgeois at whose house in Cligny he and his
comrades called to drink a drop of wine.  Judging it a welcome gift
to me, the brave fellow rode here to bring it."

"There is wine of another kind on those pages," said the Minister,
pointing to the journal with a smile.

Moltke read from the blood-stained paper:

"'_The speeches delivered yesterday at the Chamber are unanimous in
the declaration that the French people will be disgraced forever if
the Army of the Rhine be not relieved.  The dispatches received
during the sitting of yesterday's Privy Council, from the Prefecture
of Police, the Ministry of War and of the Interior, were of a nature
to cause apprehension of the keenest.  But the disposition of the
people of Paris can be ascertained by any person whose ears are not
stuffed with Court cotton-wool.  Do not these shouts of
"Dethronement!"--these cries of "A Republic!  A Republic!" become
louder every day?_'"

He added:

"This bears out the text of Palikao's intercepted wire of yesterday
to the Emperor; and the second from the Empress, virtually saying:
'Abandon Bazaine and Paris is in revolt!'..."

Commented the Minister:

"The Empress-Regent talks like a young woman.  Palikao argues like an
old one--the speakers in the Chamber gabble like a pack of old
gossips, not one of whom looks beyond the end of her own nose.  Paris
was in revolution at the beginning of August.  She will be a
full-blown Republic before Christmas, whether Bazaine be abandoned or
not."

Moltke said, helping himself from his silver snuffbox:

"MacMahon has not the courage to resist a consensus of quackers.  He
will march east and uncover the Paris road.  I may say I had already
drawn out private tables of marches which would thwart him in any
case.  What have you there?  A wire in Secret Code?"

Bismarck answered:

"It is in Russian, with which language the sender knows me to be
acquainted.  He is an agent of our Secret Service, who combines the
trade of wool stapler with the profession of notary, and holds the
post of Sub-Prefect in the town of Rethel.  He communicates by
private wire that the Emperor has telegraphed the Prince Imperial
that the junction with Bazaine will not be attempted, and that the
march of the Army of Châlons will be directed upon Sedan.  He states
that when he quitted Rheims to-day the Imperial Headquarters had left
for Tourteron...."

"_Ei, ei_!  Is he trustworthy?" asked the Warlock, putting away the
silver box.

The Minister answered succinctly:

"The intelligence he supplies is usually worth the money he is paid
for it."

He went on:

"He has got into touch with the Roumanian Straz, who has not received
cash for some dirty work he did in July at Sigmaringen, and who
judges it advisable--Napoleon Bonaparte Grammont & Co. being
insolvent--to transfer his services to the opposite firm....  He adds
that Straz possesses, or says that he possesses, free access to the
Prince Imperial.  He appears to think our interests would be served
by kidnapping the boy."

"Would they?" asked Moltke.

The Minister raised his shaggy brows, and answered smilingly:

"You are acquainted with the Countess's views in connection with the
youngest Bonaparte.  If the Queen does not want him to hand her tea
and comb her lap dog, why should I not take M. Lulu home as a present
to my wife?"

"You are jesting!" said the Warlock, shaking the wise old head in the
scratch wig.  "You have told this stinking rogue that decent German
men make not war upon women or children....  When the time comes that
we are guilty of such things, United Germany will be near her fall."

"Her barometer predicts a rise," said the Minister dryly, "at this
particular moment."

"With God's help, we shall fulfill the prediction!" returned the
Warlock, going to a table where lay spread a map on a comprehensive
scale of an inch to a mile.  "We will talk over this with the King,
when the Crown Prince and Von Blumenthal come over from Ligny.  It
will be wiser to delay the movement on Paris, and hit this weather
cock of a Marshal with all our forces.  So, he marches his Army on
the Meuse!  _So'o!_..."

And he hummed a bar of the little song about the weeping flowers and
the shining starlets, as he set the mental machinery in motion that
resulted in the Grand Right Wheel.




LXI

The closed shutters of the Tessier house in the Rue de Provence gave
that pleasant, airy, well-kept residence standing behind its high
garden walls of stone-faced brick, festooned with autumn-tinted
creepers, an unoccupied and cheerless air.

Repeated rings at the bell of the white-painted gate of wrought iron
upon the right of the heavy _porte cochère_ topped by the lozenged
archway, elicited a caretaker in the person of the wife of the
gardener-coachman, who cried out joyfully upon recognizing one of the
ringers, and broke into a spate of words:

"Mademoiselle! ... Madame Charles!  A thousand pardons for the error!
But a return so unexpected.  Nothing is ready...."  She queried, her
eyes becoming circular as they drank in the fact that the
newly-married wife of her master had arrived in company of a strange
young gentleman in a shabby brown suit of foreign make, and a straw
hat decidedly the worse for wear: "Madame Tessier has not accompanied
you?...  Or Monsieur Charles?...  Nothing has happened?"  Upon being
assured that her employers were well, and still in Belgium, she
raised her eyes piously, and heaved a sigh of relief.  "In these days
such terrible things happen!" sighed the gardener-coachman's wife.
"No one knows who the Prussians will not kill next!...  Though, what
with the soldiers that have gone away--regiments and regiments
marching with their bands!--and the guns--thousands of guns rolling
and rolling!--one would say that France possessed enough men....  But
who knows!  One can feel the fears of the people like a dark cloud
blackening the sky....  They say that at Meudon the trees have been
cut down and trenches dug, and beautiful villas blown up with
gunpowder that the Germans may not live in them when they come.  Of
what use, then, the great cannon that break the windows when they
fire them from the Forts of Issy and Meudon, Vanvres and Mont
Valérien, if they cannot keep such people back?"

She had looked at the young man who accompanied Madame Charles as she
put her question.  He answered, with appreciation of the shrewdness
prompting the question:

"One wishes one could answer that!  But it is all true about the
trenches and so on....  All the main roads leading north and west and
east from Paris have been cut up in the same way.  And the bridges
have been mined--but they will not blow them up yet.  They will wait
until the Prussians come!"

"_Grand Dieu_!  And all our hospitals here are full of wounded
soldiers.  They arrive in trains or wagons every hour....  People
wait at the railway stations and at the barriers in crowds to see
them.  Sometimes one cries out: '_My brother!_' or '_My
husband!_'--or '_My son!_'..."

The wide mouth of the little woman widened in a grimace of misery.
She gulped and sniffed, and the tears began to tumble from her beady
black eyes.  "My brother Michel has been killed!...  My sister has
received an official letter that says so.  Also my husband's nephew,
Jean Jacques--the dear youth who served Madame Tessier so
faithfully....  Madame Charles must remember him going about the
house in his striped jacket, cleaning the silver and sweeping and
polishing the parquet....  And now my poor Potier, whom Madame
Charles cannot have forgotten....  At fifty years of age, he has been
called to serve again!"

Her poor Potier was even then marching with MacMahon's hundred
thousand toward Montmedy by Mézières, and the end that was to meet
him there, as the little woman dried her eyes with her blue apron,
and bestirred herself to welcome one whom she firmly believed to be
her young master's wife.

"No luggage!  Madame has returned without luggage!" she commented
mentally, as the driver of the hack vehicle that had brought Madame
and her companion from the station was paid and jingled away.

Then as she shut the outer gate and locked it she realized that the
companion of Madame Charles was a foreigner.  She could hear the pair
conversing in an unknown jargon as they stood together near the
terrace steps.  Upon which the perplexity of honest Madame Potier was
banished by an effort of simple reasoning.  The strange young man
would be a Belgian--an employee of M. Charles.  M. Charles had
determined, all the world knew, to engage a resident bookkeeper.
This must be the Belgian bookkeeper who had accompanied Madame.  For
his manner was humble to dejectedness, as became a dependent, and he
looked at Madame with extreme wistfulness.  He was actually saying:

"This means good-bye, I suppose, doesn't it?..."

Juliette returned, with her heart wavering in her like a wind-blown
taper flame:

"If you desire it, Monsieur, of course it is good-bye!"

He perused the gravel walk with an appearance of great interest.

It was extraordinary that neither he nor Madame had brought any
luggage....  Madame Potier fairly writhed with curiosity to learn the
reason why.  She could restrain herself no longer.  She cried, madly
clashing the gate keys:

"But the luggage, Madame! ... The carriage has driven away without
depositing it.  What of the trunks, imperials, portmanteaux, bonnet
boxes that Madame possessed when she went away?..."

She was a little, voluble, excitable Frenchwoman, with shiny black
hair, bright, snapping black eyes, and a hectic spot in the center of
each cheek.  As yet her environment had not brought home to her what
War meant in reality.  When she had wept for her brother and her
nephew by marriage, and at parting with her husband, she had relapsed
into her accustomed round of duties, not unpleasantly varied by her
newer responsibilities as guardian of her mistress's empty dwelling.
Like many other excellent women of her type, she could not read or
write, and relied on local news imparted by her gossips and bits of
intelligence left by the baker with his bread rolls, or served by the
woman who brought the morning's milk.

Now Madame Charles turned to her and told her:

"The boxes and imperials are left behind in Belgium, dear Madame
Potier.  As for the articles I brought with me, they have been torn
to pieces by the lancers of M. de Bismarck.  Also the luggage of this
gentleman, who has, like myself, nothing left but the clothes that he
is wearing.  Thank him, for had he not protected me, I should never
have reached this house!"

"Great Heaven!"  Little Madame Potier threw her hands and eyes
heavenward.  "What wretches!  What terrible dangers Madame has
surmounted!...  What horrors one hears of!--what miseries and
sufferings!...  Death is everywhere....  One would say it was the end
of the world!  But still there is hope, is not there, Madame?...  Our
glorious Army..."

Juliette turned a snow-white face upon the eager woman, and lifted a
little, tragic hand.  She said, and in that tone and with that look
most feared and dreaded by the man who loved her:

"Our glorious Army has been betrayed and massacred!  With these eyes
I who speak to you have seen vast tracts of country covered with the
slain!"

Madame Potier winced and drew herself together.  Her black eyes
glared.  The red spots sank out of her sharp face.  And Juliette went
on:

"I traversed one of these huge fields of carnage.  Many Germans were
there--but most of the dead were our French soldiers....  And in the
silence you heard their blood running, and the earth lapping it like
a great thirsty dog!..."

In the throat of the other woman, listening, an hysterical knot began
growing.  You could see it working as her dry lips twitched.  She
held her breath as though to keep back a scream.

"I sought among all these dead men for my father," said Juliette.
"And I found him!...  His dead hand beckoned me from a mountain of
corpses....  I would have known it without the ring that he always
wore....  And I went to him and sat beside him, and asked God to let
me die also....  And a sword seemed to cut my soul from my body....
I grew cold--and all was blackness about me!...  I felt no more ... I
breathed no more ... I thought: '_This must be death!_'  Then a voice
spoke to me....  I was too far away to answer.  It called me
loudly--and I came to life again....  I rose up....  I saw the face
of the man who had called me....  And then I knew why I must not die
just yet!"

She laughed, and so strangely that Madame Potier cried out in terror.
She would have rushed at the girl and clutched her but for Breagh's
strong interposing hand.  He said in her ear in the bad French she
took for Belgian:

"Madame has traveled many miles, fasting, and she has suffered a
great bereavement....  Do not question her, but go and make ready her
apartment, and prepare food for her.  Hot soup--she needs that before
all!"

The little woman addressed looked sharply at the speaker, then
mounted the two steps leading to the terrace, scuttled across it in
front of the shuttered windows of the drawing-room and billiard-room,
descended the steps upon the other side, and vanished in the
direction of the basement kitchen door.

Then P. C. Breagh, wondering at his own daring, stretched out a hand
and touched Juliette's.  It was very cold.  He lifted it gently and
led her unresisting down the ivy-bordered path that led into the
pleasance.

For she must not be left alone in this mood, and the garden was
still, and scented, and beautiful in the noonday sunshine.  Its beds
of autumn flowers blazed from their setting of smooth and still
verdant turf.  The great wistaria on the stable buildings was
magnificent in trails of fading purple blossoms.  The oaks were
browning, the chestnuts shedding their yellow fans.  The stately
limes were bleached pale golden, the tall acacias were already
stripped quite bare.

It was not yet the season of song for thrush and blackbird, but the
robin's sweet shrill twitter came from the heart of a hawthorn,
marvelously laden with gorgeous crimson fruit.  The breast of the
bird, not yet attired in fullest winter plumage, showed orange as
japonica berries beside the ripe haws' splendid hue.

Said P. C. Breagh, trying to speak lightly and naturally:

"Look at him!  What a pretty little beggar!  Nobody ever told me you
had robins in France!..."  Then as the bird cocked his round bright
eye and hopped to a higher twig, and Juliette's pale face remained
unchanged, and her fixed stare blankly ignored him, her sorrowful
friend cried out in a passion of entreaty:

"Juliette!  Juliette, take care!  For the love of God, don't yield to
this!  Oh, Juliette! have pity upon others, even if you have none on
yourself!"

The cry touched a chord that responded in vibration.  The stiff waxen
mask softened, and became the face he knew.  She looked at him, and
her eyes were no longer fixed and glassy.  She asked in wonder:

"What do you want me to do?"

Trees hid them from the house with its closed slatted shutters.  They
were near a rustic seat that was under the great tulip tree.  Breagh
led her to the seat, made her sit down, and sat himself beside her.
He made no effort to retain the little hand.  "_It is not mine,_" he
said to himself, as he looked at it, and then his heart jolted, and
stood still....  Where was her wedding ring?...  Didn't French
married ladies wear the plain gold circlet?  Of course they did!
Then why?...  Came her faint, sad voice again:

"What is it I might do and do not do, for myself and others?  Tell
me, Monsieur, for I do not like to be unkind!"

He said, trying to speak clearly and unemotionally: "It is because
you love so greatly those who are near you that I ask you to be kind
to these and to yourself.  You have suffered a great loss, you brood
upon it to your injury....  You dream of revenge upon a man,
high-placed and powerful, whom you accuse of having brought about the
War."

She had taken off the black silk veil that she had worn as head
covering.  A dry leaf fluttered down from the tulip tree and crowned
her splendid coils of mist-black hair.  Her thin arched brows were
drawn together and frowning; from the dark caverns that Grief had
hollowed round them looked eyes that were cold and hard and brilliant
as blue diamonds.  She asked in almost a whisper:

"And if I dream ... and accuse ... am I not justified?...  Because he
saved your life, do you take his part?"

Breagh answered her with a sudden spurt of anger:

"I take no part.  I speak for your own good.  If a woman as frail and
sensitive as you are yields to the promptings of a hate so
overwhelming, a time comes when she cannot, if she would, control
them or rule herself....  When voices sound in her ears, urging her
to deeds of violence, and she cannot silence them by any prayers....
Then she goes away into a strange dim country peopled with
shadows--lovely or queer, strange or awful.  And that is the country
of Madness, where live the insane....  Even those who love her as
I--as your friends and your husband love you!--can never reach her
there!"

The pleading seemed to touch her.  Two great tears over-brimmed her
pure pale underlids and fell upon her shabby black gown.  She said,
trembling a little:

"You are very good to have so much solicitude for me.  I thank you
very humbly.  It is true that I have sustained a terrible wound, and
that it rankles--is that the right word?  My nature is not
gentle--not amiable!--I long to strike back when I am wounded....
When those I love are hurt..."  She stopped and controlled herself
with a visible effort, then resumed: "I have it in me to be pitiless!
See you well, there is something of my mother in me!"

"Of your mother?..."

He echoed the words in dismay that was almost ludicrous....  He had
never asked whether Juliette possessed a mother or not.  Now he
looked to the house, expecting one of the shuttered French windows to
open, anticipating the appearance of a middle-aged lady arrayed in
mourning crape and weepers, and Juliette followed and understood his
look.  She said, with sorrowful meaning:

"Where friends of my father live.  Monsieur, you do not find my
mother.  She is very beautiful, but not good, not noble, as he!...
She left him many years ago, when I was an infant.  See!  I could not
have been higher than that!"  She measured with her hand above the
turf the height of the baby of five years, with hair that had been
silky and yellow as newly hatched chickens' down.  She said, her
clear, transparent face darkening with the shadow that swept across
her memory: "Before I encountered you at Gravelotte I had passed
through a terrible experience.  This lady--of whom I dread to
speak!--was thrown across my path.  She did not reveal to me that she
was my mother, when I quitted Brussels in her company....  She
represented herself as the wife of an officer who had been wounded.
She told me that my father was a prisoner in the hands of the
Prussians.  She took me to Rethel, that I might lay my case before
the Prince Imperial, and beg him to obtain my father's release."

P. C. Breagh looked at her doubtfully, fearing--what he most feared
for her.  She said, drawing a folded envelope from the bosom of her
black school dress:

"Never shall I forget how graciously Monseigneur received me.  Here
is a little keepsake he gave me with his own hand....  You shall hold
it in yours, because you are my friend, and Monseigneur would permit
it....  No one else, because no one deserves it save you!"

And she exhibited with dainty pride the splinter of rusty scrap iron.
The envelope bore a small Imperial crown in gold, with the initial
"E" beneath....  It was directed in violet ink and in a handwriting
pointed and elegantly feminine, to S. A. the Prince Imperial, with
the Great Headquarters of the Imperial Army, at the Prefecture of
Metz.

"He is so brave!...  He wanted to join M. de Bazaine and fight the
Prussians.  He stamped ... he wept ... he suffered such chagrin when
the telegram came from the Emperor....  No!  I must not tell you of
the telegram....  My Prince said: '_Mademoiselle shall hear it
because she is discreet!_'..."

She folded away her treasure in the envelope that bore the Empress's
handwriting, and hid it away again in its sweet nest close to her
innocent heart.  Life and vivacity were hers again as she descanted
upon the graces and gifts of her Imperial princeling, and P. C.
Breagh listened, grateful for the change in her.  The shadow came
back for a moment as she told him:

"And when I descended to the vestibule, Madame had gone away....  She
had been seized with faintness in the moment of our arrival, when she
had encountered a stranger passing through the hall....  Then I went
back to the hotel, and crept up to my room quietly.  Madame--whom I
had discovered to be my mother!--was engaged with a visitor....  I do
not know at all who he was.  But I heard him say, on the other side
of the door that was between us ...  '_When she comes, you shall
present me to the little Queen of Diamonds!_'  And he laughed....
_Mon Dieu!_ how strange a laugh!...  It made me feel cold.  It makes
me cold even now to remember it....  But I do not think I have been
really warm since the night upon which I found the portrait, and my
mother said: '_The discovery was inevitable!  Now, with your leave, I
am going to sleep!_'"

With such truth did she render the very tone of the sumptuous
Adelaide's languid irony that P. C. Breagh started as though he had
been stung.  Somewhere he had met someone ... a woman who spoke like
that?...  Who was she?  Where had they encountered?...  He beat his
brains to evoke some reply, in vain.  And Juliette went on:

"It does me good to tell you this, Monsieur, though I thought at
first I would not.  You will understand how terrible it was to
discover in this lady, who had deceived me, the mother whom I have
believed dead until a few months ago.  There was something in her
very beauty, and ah! she is so beautiful!--that made me regard her
with terror....  See you, I prayed to Our Blessed Lady for aid to
overcome that terror.  Then at the daybreak, I rose and went to her
bed.  When I saw her sleeping, I think I feared her more than ever.
The face can reveal so much, Monsieur, in sleep.  And hers was a
sleep uneasy, and troubled by visions....  Without waking she said a
thing so strange....  '_Only a woman of fashion would be guilty of
such infamy!_' ... What made you start so violently, Monsieur?"

For P. C. Breagh had jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet.
His mouth screwed itself into the shape of a whistle, his eyes
rounded unbecomingly.  He remembered when and where he had heard that
utterance--in the resonant accents of the Man of Iron, and addressed
to the adventurous beauty encountered at the Foreign Office in the
Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.

What were the words that had preceded the sentence, scathing in their
irony, terrible in their implied contempt?

"_It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than
Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus
Libertina....  Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such
infamy....  Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!_"

And an English boy had picked it up, and seen the devastating change
wrought in that softly tinted mask of sensuous beauty, by Conscience,
roused to anguish by the vitriol splash of scorn.

So the Duessa of the Wilhelm Strasse was Madame de Bayard!  How
strange the chance encounter that had brought them together in that
house!  What was the bargain she had hoped to drive with Bismarck?
What had she intended when she had taken her daughter to Rethel?  Who
was the man who had been waiting to be presented to the little Queen
of Diamonds?...  And how true had been the instinct that had warned
the girl of danger, whose nature her Convent-bred innocence made it
impossible for her to conceive?

She was speaking:

"Do not think me wicked or insensible, Monsieur.  I am deeply
sensible of all your goodness!...  I know very well that there is
truth in what you say!...  You are noble, candid, magnanimous....
You do not comprehend what it is to hate so that it is torture ...
like fire burning here, here, and here!..."

She touched her slight bosom and her throat with the joined
finger-tips of her small hands, shielded her eyes and forehead with
them an instant, then swept them wide apart.  A curious gesture, and
notable, in its suggestion of surging overwhelming emotion, and the
dominance of an impulse obsessing in its evil strength.

"Here where it is so quiet I shall recover in a little....  I shall
become calmer....  I shall learn to sleep again....  You cannot
imagine how much I wish to sleep, Monsieur!...  But when I lie down
it is as though great doors in my brain were thrown wide open.  There
is music ... and processions of people come pouring, pouring
through....  There are voices that make great clamor--there are hands
that wave to me and beckon.  But I clench my own hands and lie
still--so very still!  I pray to Our Lord that one figure may not
pass among the others, for then I know I shall have to get up and
follow him....  I cry to Our Lady to cover my eyes with Her cool
hands, that I may not see if he does come.  But always he passes;
walking or driven in a chariot--riding a great horse, or borne upon
the shoulders of guards.  And then I resist no more, for it is
useless!  I wake!--and I am standing in the middle of my room!"

Said P. C. Breagh, comprehending the situation: "In a word, you are
suffering from overstrain and consequent insomnia.  And I wish I were
a full-blown M.D., because I think I should know what to do.  But you
will let me prescribe the doctor, if I may not undertake the case,
won't you?  What's that?  Who's there?"

Something like a gurgling laugh had sounded behind them, and Juliette
glanced round, and back at Carolan with something of the old gayety
in her eyes.

"It is the Satyr of the pool, where Madame Tessier grows her water
plants.  He laughs like that when the water bubbles in his throat."

She rose and followed a little path leading through a shrubbery of
lilac and syringa.  Beyond rose the ivy-hung and creeper-covered
eastern boundary wall of the pleasance.  From the grinning mouth of
the Satyr mask wrought in gray stone the slender spring spouted no
longer.  It trickled from a hole in the pipe behind the mask, and yet
the laugh sounded at intervals as of old.  The wall below the mask
was wet, and green with a slimy moss-growth, fed by the dampness; the
ferns that bordered the pool, the water plants that grew in it, had
suffered from the diminution of their supply.  The brook had
diminished to a slender trickle winding among stones crowned with dry
and withering mosses.  Juliette cried out at the spectacle in sheer
dismay.


What would Madame say if she knew how spoiled was this, her cherished
bit of sylvan beauty?  Never mind.  When she returned all should be
found in order of the best.  The kitchen garden, perforce neglected
since the departure of M. Potier, should be weeded diligently.  The
dead roses should be snipped off with loving care, the withered
blossoms pulled from the sheaths of the flaming gladioli....  The
place needed a mistress, that was plain to Mademoiselle de Bayard's
order-loving eye.

"We will work here!..." she said, and almost clapped her hands at the
thought of the pleasant labor waiting them.  "Me, I adore gardening!
And you also--do you not, Monsieur?..."

Could P. C. Breagh deny?  He cried with a hot flush of joy at the
thought of long days of sweet companionship: "Indeed I do!... and of
course I will, Madame!"

"'_Madame!..._'"

She had nearly betrayed the truth, but she nipped her stern upper lip
close down upon its rosy fellow....  Was she not married?  Nearly, if
not quite....

So nearly that until M. Charles appeared with Madame, she would
maintain the character of a recent bride.  It would be better not to
rekindle in the gray eyes of Monica's brother that fire that had
blazed there so fiercely a few hours before.




LXII

How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a
stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of?  In January
they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and
had spent together not quite three days....  But what days! to brand
themselves upon the memory.  After that morning on the bloody field
of Gravelotte--that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of
Madame Guyot--that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in
hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be
ever anything but friends?...  Close friends ... dear comrades,
linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of
experiences unforgettable by both....  What would Life be like when
one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of
Monica's brother?...  Juliette did not dare to question.  The thought
of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.

Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming
Madame served with the best that could be got.  A lentil soup--an
omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden.  One would do
better later, let Madame only wait....  The apartment of Madame
Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually
occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian
gentleman....  Or--since that room was dismantled for cleaning
purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining
... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage?  She would
guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the
bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?...  Had they not slept in that
bed for ten years past?...  Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be
sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....

The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the
excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh.  And from
that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker,
began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked
nothing better than that it should last.

It was exquisite autumn weather.  They rose early, and passed out of
the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at
the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve.  Or they
would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is
now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée.  Then
they would come back to _déjeuner_, laid on a table under the trees
on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or
talk.  But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two
months they never exchanged a word about the War.

It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his
practicing degree in Medicine, and under this _régime_ the shadow
that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day.  He had taken Madame
Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the
better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of
her master.  She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of
milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her
dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her.  Sleep returned, strength
revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less
poignant.  She could look back upon the happiness of their old life
together without the anguish that rends the heart.

Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum necessary for
housekeeping.  Under the able management of the hectic little woman,
a very little money went a long way.  Such butter, such cheese of
Brie, such excellent bread, milk and cream, such country chickens,
such fruit, and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the
table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not have been
better served.  The reward of Madame Potier was to see her handiwork
vanish under the combined onslaughts of Madame Charles and
Monsieur....  She waited upon them at table, and joined in their
conversation, after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.

As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an affection for
her young mistress, she developed cunning of a wholly lovable sort.
The first time she heard her idol laugh, she clapped her hands with
rapture.  Another day, in pursuance of a stratagem she had
elaborated, she placed upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant
boast:

"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred that no living
woman could cook _ragoût_ of veal except his wife!"

She whipped off the cover.  Madame Charles helped Monsieur in
silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played into Madame Potier's
hands.  For he sniffed approval, and said, as she set his sizzling
hot plate before him:

"M. Potier was quite right!  If the woman lives who can cook a better
_ragoût_, I've never met her, Madame!"

Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at the head
of the table.  Her sloping shoulders sloped terribly, her upper lip
was preternaturally long.  She helped herself to a very little of the
dish before her, and began to eat without perceptible enthusiasm.
Madame Potier stood back and watched her, her red hands on the hips
that were embraced by her apron of blue stuff.  She said:

"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten the _menus_ she used to
prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le Colonel."  She crossed herself
at the mention of the dead man's name.

Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of her.  She
laid down her knife and fork.  P. C. Breagh scowled savage reproof at
Madame Potier.  But Madame, at first overwhelmed, recovered herself.
She went on, as though she had never broken off:

"_Menus_ composed of excellent--but excellent dishes!...  What a pity
to think that Madame Charles cannot make them now!--Look you, to cook
well is an art that may be easily forgotten!...  Hey, Madame is not
eating to-day!"

Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:

"There is a little too much sugar in the _ragoût_, dear Madame
Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says--excellent!"

"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar----"  P. C. Breagh was
beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him,
figuratively.

"Who does not put sugar?  Will Monsieur answer me?"

The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's.  And the silvery accents of
Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:

"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases
you--the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt--these are
due to sugar--burnt and added at the last moment.  But one should use
it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"

"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion,
smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.

And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:

"Do you find it so incredible?  Well, I will not boast now, but
presently--you shall see!"

Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an
unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the
good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their
voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly
shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or
crested wren.  The twelve o'clock _déjeuner_ was memorable, the five
o'clock dinner a marvel, from the _croûte au pot_ to the _sole au
gratin_, and from the sole to the _filet aux champignons_!  There
were _beignets_ afterward--crisp, adorable, light as bubbles.  P. C.
Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled.
Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this
slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling
eyes.

Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been
committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of
thin filmy black.  Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and
polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of
the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the
ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin.  Her dainty slimness was
emphasized by the absence of all ornament.  Her marvelous black hair,
fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled
temples with its dusky coils.  When she lifted a slender arm to
thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky
caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the
tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.

She did not look as though she had been toiling in a kitchen among
casseroles and stew pots.  Rather an elfin Queen of Faerie--a Titania
robed in cobweb and moonbeams, whose smile sent a breeze of happiness
flowing through the sad, empty places in one's heart.  For the heart
of the young man who loved her grew the emptier the more her
sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow the more she showed
herself to be naturally a daughter of joy.

She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling looks and
lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations of gesture and
tone and inflection were for him--and no other man....  This
remembrance was always alive in Breagh to rear a barrier between him
and his Infanta....  And other knowledge, too, was his, held in
common with Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that he
had not dared to share with Juliette.

But to-night he had realized that the truth could no longer be kept
from her.  She was cured.  There could hardly be a relapse into the
old conditions, even when she learned the dreadful truth.  And even
if risk there were, she must be told that truth by him to-night, or
hear it from the lips of some stranger.  It was a miracle that she
had remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France--her beloved
France.

"For seven weeks we have played together like two children on the
brink of an open grave!" he said to himself.  "Have I been right or
wrong?  Only Time can tell!"

Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across the hall, and
down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee.  Behind those little
black beady eyes of hers she hoarded the knowledge of well-nigh
unspeakable things.  She had been faithful in guarding them from the
knowledge of Juliette.  But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You
must speak to-night, Monsieur!  We have done our best, but we two
cannot keep from the poor little lady that to-day the King of Prussia
will enter Versailles!"

She had given him a look as she had left the dining room that had
said: "Remember!"  P. C. Breagh, nerving himself to the ugly task,
felt like one who seethes the kid in its mother's milk.

As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him on the
forehead.  He picked up the red carnation that had fallen upon the
dessert plate before him.  He inhaled its fragrance lingeringly,
holding it so as to hide his mouth.  Over it his troubled gray eyes
scanned the face that was all alight with sparkling gayety.  Why had
Juliette thrown the flower?  Why had she challenged him?  She, who
had up to this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness.
Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?

She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the conviction
that her grandmother would have been horrified.  But it had been
impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile at the brooding face with
its smear of dark-red meeting eyebrows, and the short, square nose
and the pleasant lips.

He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did not permit of a
visit to the tailor.  His new linen was spotless, and under the
narrow turned-down collar he wore a loose-ended black silk tie.  The
bow was pulled out upon one side so much longer than upon the other
that Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it.  How
careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young Englishman!

She was restless this evening.  He had aroused her curiosity.  Some
hours after she had retired upon the previous night she had risen,
and stolen barefooted to the open window that looked upon the moonlit
garden, and parted the thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped
out....

There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves down.  A
white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept closely cut.  The
countless clocks of the white town of royal palaces tinkled and
chimed and belled and boomed out the witching hour of two.

Her room was on the east front, facing the garden....  A downward
glance showed her that Breagh was pacing there.

Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black prints of footsteps
upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed with dewdrops.  The presence of
so many reservoirs makes Versailles more than a trifle damp.

How rash!...  How unwise!  Did the young man desire a fever?
Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her Colonel, for his health's
sake, to a daughterly surveillance, had a lecture ready on the tip of
her tongue.  She might have spoken, had not the patroling figure come
to a standstill, and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and
said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken his head
and gone away.

"I've got to tell!--and I don't want to tell!--and I don't know how
to tell, that's the bother of it!...  Give it up!...  For another
night!"

Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake would have
conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to the subject of his sore
reflections, returning in a flutter of strange, sweet wonder, and
expectation, to her recently vacated couch.

You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his miserable gray
eyes looking at her out of the shadows in the corners.  Those eyes
could blaze in tigerish fashion when he was angry, for she had
seen....  When she had crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death
bed, they had flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and
when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....

Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms, and held
against the heart that shook one with its beating....  Was it wicked
to feel that one hated Charles Tessier?  Was it unnatural, in these
days of mourning, to think of anyone except her lost Colonel?...  Was
it not exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother
should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not want to
say, and did not know how to say, no later than the following
night?...

True--she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression that she
was married, but she would explain that she had meant that she would
be by and by....  Alas! what would her grandmother, that sainted
woman, have said regarding this lapse from the way of truth?




LXIII

But she certainly had not planned to throw the carnation.  The
missile hurled, she had been seized with paralyzing fright.  The
shade of her grandmother seemed to rise, appalling in its shocked
propriety.  One could almost hear her saying: "_My unhappy child, you
have become more like your mother than I could have believed, had I
not seen!..._"

Now in sheer desperation she mocked on, dissembling her terror.

"What is the matter?  Why are you so dull and _distrait_?  Are you
tired of living shut up in a garden?  Answer me, I pray you,
Monsieur!"

He looked at her, and his cleft chin squared itself, and his broad
red eyebrows lowered into a line of determination.  He said doggedly:

"The happiest time of my life has been spent shut up in this garden!
I believe you know that very well!"

She burst into silver laughter and cried to him teasingly:

"But you did not look at all happy when I peeped at you in the night
from my window.  See!  Thus, with the hands miles deep in the
pockets, and the shoulders elevated to the tips of the ears!"

She jumped up and mimicked the slouching gait of the midnight
cogitator, brilliantly and with fidelity, parading between the dinner
table and the long windows that opened toward the lawn.  He
recognized himself, and reddened, while he laughed with vexation.  He
had never before seen her in this mood of Puck-like mischief.  He had
yet to become acquainted with another phase of Juliette.

"Did you learn to act so well at your Convent?" he asked her, and she
answered with sudden gravity:

"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur....  It is a gift, of the good
angels or the bad ones, which can be brought to perfection by use.
To 'make' an artist of the stage is not possible.  He or she is born
... and that is all I know...."  She added: "When I make my
appearance at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you a _billet de
faveur_.  Then you shall see acting.  I promise you!"

She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held up her fairy
finger, and smiled and sparkled at the bewildered young man.

"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the part of a
grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put on wrinkles with
paint? ... _Non, merci_!  The true artist says to herself, '_I am
old!_' and she is old....  '_I am ugly!_' and she becomes hideous.
'_I am wicked!_'  See here!...  Is this a face to regard with love,
Monsieur?"

The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken.  No Japanese
mask of a witch could well have been more furrowed, puckered,
scowling, or malignant than the face that had been Titania's a moment
back.  Breagh called out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly
fascinated; and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:

"Or I can be stupid, very stupid--if that will please you!...
Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls....  We had one at the
Convent--your countrywoman and a great heiress.  Miss Smizz--the
daughter of Smizz and Co., Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."

She banished all expression save a smile of absolute fatuity, puffed
out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids, permitting her eyes to twinkle
through the merest slits.  She giggled inanely, and said, combining
the consonantal thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a
hen-turkey...

"All the eggstras....  Whad does expedse battere whed you've got a
Forchud to fall bag od?  Besides, Ba says I bust barry iddo the
Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod usually expegded of a doblebad's
wife!"

She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss Smith, her
expectations, and her splutter:

"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of you!...  I am
perhaps a little excited.  There is something strange in the air....
I have a humming in my ears as though great crowds of people were
talking very softly....  What is it?" she asked in bewilderment,
pressing the fine points of her small fingers into her temples.
"What is the matter with me to-night?..."

Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a challenge to
Destiny:

"There is nothing the matter with you!...  That is the glory of it!
You were ill, and now you are well....  You can laugh again, and
sleep again, and cook a dinner and help to eat it....  You have made
capital use of your time!...  For we came here on the twenty-first of
August, and this is the fifth of October.  We have been shut up in a
garden, as you say yourself, for more than six weeks!..."

"Can it be possible?"

She looked at him intently and realized his earnestness.  He answered
with a glow of pride in his work:

"Fact!  And in all the time you have never seen a newspaper or asked
a question about the War.  Even when you have heard the great guns
firing from the forts below Paris--Issy and Vanves and Montrouge and
the rest--you never said a word that showed you noticed....  Do you
know why?..."

His voice wavered exultantly.  She looked at him and slightly shook
her head.

"No!..."

"Because I willed you to.  By George! there are times when I believe
that even yet I'd make a doctor.  Mental suggestion was the line I
took with you...."  He rubbed his hands.  "Not that I could have done
anything without the help of Madame Potier--first-class little
woman!--regular brick that she is!...  You see, your brain had sucked
up all the trouble it was capable of holding.  You wanted rest....
Well, you've had it, thank God!  Night after night I've walked up and
down, backward and forward, on the lawn, just as you saw me doing
last night, saying: 'Sleep!  Forget!  You have my orders to!"

The tone of mastery thrilled, even while the muscles of her mouth
twitched with repressed laughter.  He was beautiful in her eyes as he
leaned forward smiling at her.  She said, repressing her tears, and
concealing her admiration:

"But last night you did not say 'Sleep!' but something else,
Monsieur...."

There was a swift change in him, telling her that for once he was not
listening.  His eyes were alert, his ear eagerly drank in a sound
composed of many sounds that grew louder as they came more near.  Now
the whole room was full of the trampling of horses and the fainter
clink of spur and scabbard and bridle....  Cavalry were passing up
one of the great avenues south of the Rue de Provence--not the Avenue
of St. Cloud--probably the Rue des Chantiers--there was a distant
roar of cheers....  Then in one little oasis of silence came the
rolling of carriages, and then the walls shivered with the roaring of
lusty lungs:

"_Hoch der König!  Hoch der Kronprinz!_"--and the shouts were drowned
in a great burst of martial music, and the trampling of men and
horses, mingled with the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets,
rolled on tumultuously again.

The blood ebbed from Juliette's cheeks and lips to her heart as she
listened.  Then the double doors of the dining room were butted open
with the corner of a wooden coffee tray, and Madame Potier appeared
with a steaming pot and two cups.  She was pale round the hectic
patches that blazed in her thin face.  Her black eyes leaped to
Breagh's with an eager question in them ... "_Have you told her?_"
... and he answered with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

Then before either of them knew, Juliette had risen.  She went to the
little woman and kissed her on the cheek.  She said, taking one of
the gnarled work-worn hands in one of hers and holding out the other
to Carolan:

"Dear friends, to whom I owe so much, tell me now what in your great
compassion you have kept from me.  For I think the time has come when
I must hear!"

The time had come, indeed, with the ring of Prussian cavalry hoofs
upon the ancient cobblestones, and the roll of the carriages that
came with them.  And before either of those the girl addressed could
speak in answer, the resonant sound of a Prussian trumpet pierced
their silence:

"_Clear the way!  Clear the way!  Here comes the King!_"

And followed a cry, pitiful as the wail of a hare in a gin trap:
"Those are Prussians!" ... and another scream, shrill and thin and
clear....  Then a crash!...  Madame Potier had dropped her coffee
tray....  Before the hot steam of the spilled liquid rose up from the
Tessier carpet, the small hand Breagh had clasped was suddenly,
violently snatched from him.  He sprang to his feet, but Madame
Potier had been quicker than he.  She had caught the girl round the
waist, and now wrestled with her....  The silent, desperate strife
was horrible.  The slender black-clad figure writhed for freedom like
a snake....  Then all at once the life seemed to go out of it....
They carried her to the sofa and laid her down....

"Monsieur should have told her!" Madame Potier said angrily.  "Why
leave it to the Prussians to break the news?..."  Tears were running
down her cheeks as she unfastened the girl's dress, and rubbed the
limp hands, while Breagh dropped Cognac between the little teeth, a
drop or two at a time.

And presently Juliette was looking at them, not wildly, and Madame
Potier was answering: "It was nothing!...  Madame was startled into
an attack of faintness when I was so clumsy as to drop the coffee
tray.  Now I shall go and get more, and Monsieur will talk quietly to
Madame as she lies there.  She must hear everything that we have kept
from her....  Yes, yes! that is quite understood!"

And she clumped away, with a backward glance of disdain directed at
the masculine boggler, and Breagh drew a chair near the sofa where
his wan Infanta lay, and sat down and told her all.

Red sunset flooded the autumn garden as he talked.  Not a leaf
stirred, hardly a bird uttered a nooning note.  But the strange sound
that had haunted not only the ears of Juliette went on incessantly.
It was the sighing and whispering and muttering of the vast crowds
that had filled the Rue des Chantiers behind the lines of troops to
witness the entrance of the conquerors, and now gorged the great
Place of the Prefecture (above whose entrance flaunted the standard
of the Hohenzollerns)--filled the upper end of the Avenue de
Paris--and surged over the vast expanse of the Place d'Armes, beating
in black and restless human waves against the lofty blue and golden
railings of the Royal Château, above whose golden dome floated the
black-and-white Prussian Standard and the white Flag with the red
Geneva Cross.

We know what he had to tell her....  The false step of MacMahon, the
unavailing attempt of Bazaine to break out of Metz, the conflict on
the Meuse, ending in defeat and the loss of 7,000 prisoners with guns
and transport.  The flight and escape of the Emperor to the fortress
city of Sedan....  The battle between the ill-led, unfed, dispirited
French forces and the Three Armies.  The taking of 20,000 French
prisoners, the wound of MacMahon, leading to his resignation of the
chief command into the hands of General Wimpffen, summoned from his
command in Algeria in time to capitulate.  The pitiable surrender of
the Emperor's sword to the King of Prussia.  His transport into
Belgium as a prisoner of War.  The flight of the Empress from the
Tuileries.  The formation at Paris of the New Government of National
Defense.  The entry of the King of Prussia into Rheims, and the
arrival of the First and Third Armies in force before Paris.  The
fight upon the heights of Châtillon--the defeat of Ducrot by a
Bavarian Division--the German advance upon Nemours and Pitiviers--the
investment of the capital, now encircled with an iron ring.

For three days the Crown Prince had been established with his Staff
at the Prefecture.  This day had seen the Great Headquarters of the
Prussian King removed to Versailles, from Baron Rothschild's Castle
of Ferrières....

Truly it had been time to break the news to Juliette.  She lay still
during the recital, only quivering now and then.  She drank the
coffee when Madame Potier brought it, and thanked the faithful soul
affectionately.  When the gas lamps were lighted, and the shutters
shut, she bade P. C. Breagh good night in a faint whisper, and gave
him both hands, saying with a liquid glance:

"Thank you, my friend!..."

He whispered as he kissed the little fingers:

"You will sleep to-night, will you not?..."

And she nodded in assent.  But when he had gone to his bed at the
cottage, the old terrible thoughts came crowding back.

That electrifying blast of glorious sound from the silver instrument
of the Great Staff trumpeter had wakened and brought them like
hornets buzzing and stinging about her ears....  She longed for her
friend, but he had departed.  And the loneliness was too terrible to
bear.

She caught up a little white shawl that she had brought with her, and
often wore when walking in the garden upon chilly evenings, or going
to Mass in the early mornings, before the sunshine had warmed the
air.  One turn of the wrist draped it faultlessly about her head and
body.  Thus shielded, she went into the hall, and laid her hand upon
the lock of the door.

As she did so, cavalry horses ridden at a sharp trot came clattering
down the cobbled street.  They were pulled up outside the Tessier
mansion.  There was an imperious tug at the gate bell.  She waited
for the opening of the kitchen door.

Then she heard it unlocked, and the clatter of Madame Potier's clogs
upon the terrace.  _Klop--klop--klop!_ they crossed the leads,
descended the three steps that led to the gravel walk, and went on to
the iron gate.  It was locked, as always, in the absence of Madame
Tessier.  Presently the keys clashed, the lock scrooped back from the
mortise, and the hinges uttered a protesting cry....

Then the harsh tones of a man, speaking French with a frightful
German accent, turned the listening girl to ice.  There was an
exclamation from Madame Potier, a rejoinder in the stranger's
gutturals.  A horse trampled.  The rough voice of the rider swore at
the brute in German.  Then there was a clatter of boots upon the
pavement, with a great clinking of spurs and scabbard, and the
now-dismounted rider said in his infamous French jargon:

"Go you before and open!  His Excellency is coming in!"

Terrified, Madame Potier obeyed ... scuttling across the terrace like
a frightened beetle.  Juliette, paralyzed with horror, heard the
heavy spurred footsteps crunch and jingle up the gravel walk and
ascend the steps to the hall door.  Almost directly, as little Madame
Potier darted panting up the stairs from the kitchen, the hall
doorbell clanged a deafening peal.

A carriage had rolled down the Rue de Provence, and stopped before
the smaller gate, ere the doorbell's iron echoes had ceased shouting
through the house of the Tessiers.  There were other voices at the
gate, other footsteps upon the gravel....  They mounted the steps.  A
resonant, unforgotten voice said to the ringer in German:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble....  I will
interview the people of the house myself!"

The person addressed replied in the harsh tones that had terrified
Madame Potier:

"But supposing Your Excellency be met with some insolence?..."

The resonant voice answered with a smile in it: "In that case, Herr
Intendant General, my Excellency will take the risk.  There are only
women in the house, and should they offer violence, I have Count
Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here!..."

There was a laugh--gay, mellow, and careless--and a young man's voice
answered:

"Your Excellency may safely rely on our protection!"

There was another laugh.  Under cover of it, Madame Potier hissed
into the head folds of the white shawl:

"They have quartered the Prussian Chancellor and the Foreign Office
upon us.  That is what the sacred brute in the big boots and
spectacles shouted, when I went down to open the front gate....  What
is the Prussian Foreign Office?"

From the white folds of the shawl a sibilant whisper hissed at her:

"It is a man.  They call him Count Bismarck.  Now if you love me, be
quiet, and watch and listen.  He shall ring the bell with his own
hand....  Then I open the door!..."

"But, Madame!..." whispered the distracted caretaker.

No verbal answer....  The white shawl pulled closer, shrouding round
the slender form and girlish features.  A little hand, firm and
unfaltering, ready upon the latch of the door.

Poor Potier whimpered....

"Madame Charles....  My child! my treasure! for the love of Christ
and Mary!...  Tell me what you are going to do!"

The bell rang again, with a new and imperious hand upon it.  She well
knew whose was the hand.  And the snow-water in her veins became
liquid fire.  She threw open the hall door and stepped back to admit
the Man of Iron.

He stood upon the doorsteps like the house's master, a huge
dominating figure, dressed as she had seen him on the battlefield of
Gravelotte, in his high black, pewter-buttoned military frock and
white peaked Cuirassier cap, riding cords, and great black jack-boots
with long steel spurs.  He was powdered with dust as a man newly come
off a journey, though his boots were clean, for he had driven in a
carriage from Ferriéres.  Upon the step below him stood Count
Hatzfeldt, his First Secretary, a man of thirty, tall,
broad-shouldered, and _débonnaire_, wearing, as did Bismarck-Böhlen,
the semi-military Foreign Office undress.  The lean trap-jawed
personage in a dark uniform with velvet facings, whom we must
recognize as the Intendant General, waited in the background, glaring
through his spectacles at the tardy portress in the white shawl, and
the peaked face and flaring black eyes of little Madame Potier, who
stood beside her mistress as ready to spit and scratch for her sake
as a pussy cat to defend its young.

There was no pause.  The dominating figure stepped into the hall.
His great Cuirassier sword clanked on the threshold.  He touched the
peak of his cap with his bare right hand, and said, looking down from
his great height upon the women:

"This is the house of the Famille Tessier?"

One of the women, who was swaddled in a white shawl, dropped him a
stiff little middle-class reverence.  Behind her, the other bobbed a
serving woman's curtsy.  He went on, addressing White Shawl as the
superior:

"This house, Madame, has been selected as the official residence of
the Prussian Foreign Office.  We shall pay you an adequate sum for
our accommodation, and remain here some weeks ... possibly three."

He glanced at Hatzfeldt, and said with a flicker of sardonic humor
playing in his heavy blue eyes, and about the corners of the deeply
cut mouth that was masked by the heavy iron-gray mustache:

"Though the actual duration of the visit depends--not upon
ourselves--but upon the decision of the United German Powers, and the
position which they shall decide to take up with regard to Conditions
of Peace.  We are not the invited guests of France, whose stay can be
cut short because our manners do not prepossess our hostess.  We came
because we thought it advisable ...  we will go when it is convenient
to depart!"

"If Jules Faure could hear Your Excellency!..." said Bismarck-Böhlen,
grinning.

"He would cast up his fine eyes more tragically than he did at
Ferrières," said Hatzfeldt, "when the three words, '_Forfeiture of
Territory_,' drew from them so many patriotic tears...."

"He is a weeper," said the Minister, pulling off his left glove, "and
Wimpffen was a posturer, with his '_Moi, soldat de l'Armée
Français_'--and the Duke of FitzJames is a manufacturer of
bugaboos....  Our German caricaturists should draw him as a pavement
artist, holding the hat beside a horrible red-and-yellow chalk
picture of our atrocious cruelties in Bazeilles."




LXIV

We know that Bazeilles had been on the thirty-first of August a town
of 2,000 inhabitants, mostly weavers, gathered about the ancient
château that sheltered the boyhood of the great Turenne.  Bazeilles
had not observed the Law of the Neutrality of the non-combatant.  The
village had formed the extreme right of the French position on the
day of the Battle of Sedan.  Lebrun's Corps had occupied it, and its
inhabitants had been seized with the fighting fever, and had helped
to hold back a Bavarian Division for nearly six hours.  Elderly
civilians armed with antiquated rifles had displayed desperate
bravery.  One old woman, possessed of an ancient horse pistol, is
said to have shot down three of the enemy.  The men, their women and
children, were now cinders mixed with heaps of calcined brickbats.
The grim lesson had been taught very thoroughly.  Bazeilles served as
an object-lesson on Prussian methods throughout the remainder of the
War.

"_I will remember Bazeilles!_" had flashed through the young head
that was swaddled in white woolen.  "_My friend shall not forget to
tell me what was done there!_"

But the imperious hand of the Minister was upon the door of the
billiard room.  She saw it summarily thrown open.  He went in,
followed by Hatzfeldt, Bismarck-Böhlen at their heels.

"Capital!" he said to them.  "We will have this arranged as a Bureau
for the Councilors, the dispatch secretaries, and the cipherers.
What is this?"  He went to the glass door that led into the winter
garden, looked through, and commented: "One could smoke a cigar here
after dinner in wet weather; very well, it seems to me!"


The owner of the quick ears sheltered by the shawl of white woolen
understood but little German, as she had previously said to her
absent comrade.  But what slight lore she had in the abhorred tongue
had been gained in conversation with a Prussian mistress.  She found
that, thanks to the enemy's clear, melodious diction, she had no
great difficulty in comprehending the substance of what he said.

His long heavy strides carried him next into the drawing-room, that
apartment destined to become famous in history as the seat of the
various negotiations which led to the treaties with the States of
South Germany, the proclamation of the King of Prussia as German
Emperor, and later, to the surrender of the City of Paris, and the
settlement of the Conditions of Peace.  The simply furnished,
medium-sized room boasted a few mediocre oil paintings, a cottage
piano, a sofa, some easy-chairs, and wall mirrors framed in
handsomely wrought ormolu.  Upon a little table against the wall
stood an old-world timepiece, surmounted by a bronze figure with
fiendish attributes, which engaged his attention curiously.  His
great laugh burst out, as he contemplated the grotesque.

"Now," he said, his voice still shaken by amusement, "if that
malignant little demon be a model of the guardian spirit of the
Famille Tessier, the Socialists and Ultramontane will be of opinion
that I have come to the right shop!"

The young men laughed at the jest uproariously.  He joined them,
crushing down their lighter merriment with a mirthful giant's
thunderous "Ha, ha!..."  Then the double doors of the drawing-room
opened.  He came out with his followers into the hall place,
demanding of little Madame Potier in fluent French whether gas was
laid on in the rooms above:

"I think it probable, for you are a luxurious people in your habits,
even down to the _bourgeoisie_ and peasantry of France.  At home, I
am accustomed to go to bed with a candle, and blow it out when I get
between the sheets.  But here in Gallia I shall do as the Gauls!"

"There is gas in the bedrooms, Monseigneur!" shrilled White Shawl.

"So!"  He looked down from his great height upon the speaker.  She
caught up a box of matches from the hall table and thrust it into
Madame Potier's shaking hand....

"Go up quickly.  Light the gas in the bedrooms.  Monseigneur wishes
to examine them all!"  She added in her shrill voice: "They are in
use at the moment, but can be vacated and got ready for the
occupation of Monseigneur in something less than half an hour!"  She
broke off to shriek to the ascending Madame Potier....  "Quicker,
Jeannette!  Thou art always as slow as a tortoise!...  But I come
myself!..."  And with a halting, shuffling gait which made Count
Bismarck-Böhlen grin, and even the polished Hatzfeldt put up his
eyeglass, she jerked across the beeswaxed parquet of the hall, and
mounted the gray-and-red drugget-covered stairs.

What virtue lies in contrasts!  When Juliette de Bayard walked, you
learned what poetry could be in simple motion.  Her skirts had a
rhythmic swing and flow.  Those little feet of hers made twenty steps
to the stride of an ordinary English girl.  At Mass, when folded in
her white School veil, she advanced to the Communion rail to receive
the Blessed Sacrament, she swam, she rocked as though upborne on
waves of buoyant ether.  Watching her, you would have said that thus
Our Lady must have glided onward, bearing the gracious burden of her
Divine Child.

This peacock-voiced creature who hid under a white shawl what the men
who sneered at her dimly felt must be a countenance ugly to
repulsiveness, had one shoulder thrust upward and forward, reaching
nearly to the ear on that side....  A palpable curvature of the spine
caused the curious gait, and possibly to this deformity might be
attributed the voice that was so harsh, raucous, and torturing to the
ear.

"Do not laugh....  It is pitiable rather than ridiculous," she heard
her enemy say, in his own tongue.

Hot wrath, fulminating indignation, mingled in Juliette with the
pride of the comedian who has made an effective exit....  To be
pitied by him, and for a second time!  That liquid flame that
circulated through her veins, illuminated her brain in its every cell
and convolution.  By its lurid light she saw her own intention in all
its ugliness.  Was she to blame, who had fled from this her destiny?
Had she sought for her vengeance?  Of his own will had he not come,
this world-shaking Colossus, to find his Fate waiting for him?

And Breagh.  What of her promise to her comrade?  The thought was a
knife-keen stab compelling a shriek.  She stifled it in the folds of
the shawl, bent down her head, and with an exaggeration of the
grotesque gait, scuttled upstairs with the agility of an escaping
spider, provoking a guffaw from the Twopenny Roué, a laugh from the
well-bred Hatzfeldt, even a deep chuckle from the Enemy.  Let him
laugh!  As she fled from room to room, and the gas-jets leaped up
flaring and shrieking under her small, fierce hand, like little
Furies and Vengeances, and tell-tale articles of feminine attire and
use were caught up and thrust into a small portmanteau, she bade him
laugh as much as he would.  As she opened a cupboard by the
chimney-piece where Madame Tessier had kept medicine and cosmetics,
and took from the shelf a flat-topped, wide-mouthed chemist's vial,
and thrust it within her dress, deep into her bosom, she told herself
that France should laugh before long!

Meanwhile, her enemy and France's waited, chatting in the hall at the
foot of the stair.  When she descended, he went up with Hatzfeldt and
Bismarck-Böhlen, and made a brief inspection of the rooms.  His own
choice was made with the least delay possible.  Opening from the
square, skylighted landing at the head of the main staircase, was a
room, some ten paces long and seven broad, lighted by one window on
the right side of the main front, looking toward the stables, and
commanding a view of the pleasance and shrubbery from two more
windows in the eastward wall.  This apartment, which was partly above
the dining room, and had been occupied by Madame Charles Tessier, the
Minister appropriated to his own use.  A second room, communicating
with this, and looking on the pleasance, and boasting also a glass
window door leading out upon the iron bridge topping the conservatory
on the south side, he set apart for Bismarck-Böhlen.

A somewhat better-furnished room looking upon the Rue de Provence
would serve, as would the drawing-room upon the ground floor, for the
reception of strangers and guests.  Privy Councilor Abeken would
occupy the bedroom next to this, also with an outlook upon the Rue de
Provence.  A tiny cell near the back stairs, only big enough to hold
a bed, chest of drawers, and washstand, was set apart for Secretary
Bolsing.  Upon the second floor Dr. Busch or Privy Councilor Bucher
would occupy the best bedroom, the two Prussian body servants from
the Wilhelm-Strasse sleeping in the attic overhead.  The two
remaining chambers on the second floor--small, angular,
ill-ventilated places--the women of the house were free to move into,
and retain, if they desired.  "Only in that case," said the masterful
voice, "they must contribute their services toward keeping the house
in order.  Where I live, there must be no idlers.  That is
understood!"

Below in the hall, White Shawl and Madame Potier heard his strong
laugh echoing amid the empty chambers and his heavy stride shaking
the rafters above their heads.

"I am pleased with my room, though it has a window opening toward the
stables, where the detachment of troops supplying the sentries will
be quartered for the present, with my orderly and coachman and the
two grooms.  But common sights do not annoy me, any more than common
noises, and there are two other windows overlooking the park.  The
trees in their autumn coloring will remind me of my own woodlands at
home.  Altogether the place has been chosen intelligently.  A more
roomy and better-furnished house might afford spiteful people an
excuse to accuse the Chancellor of the Confederated States of
luxury--the love of which has never been a besetting sin of mine.
True, I must have a table supplied well, punctually, and
generously....  That is always an understood thing.  A _sine qua
non_, in fact....  The King is quite aware of this....  I told him
again yesterday, ... '_Sire, I must be fed properly if I am to make
proper terms of peace!_'"

His great laugh sounded again as he came trampling downstairs,
bringing with him a masculine perfume of Russian leather and cigars
of super-excellent quality.  And Hatzfeldt was saying in his languid,
well-bred accents:

"With Your Excellency's permission, I will now take leave of you--I
must go and see the place where I am quartered.  It is at No. 25,
Avenue St. Cloud."

"So, then....  A pretty good distance from the Chancellor of the
Confederation, should he require at some unusual hour the services of
his First Secretary....  You will have to find the Count more
convenient lodgings."  The Minister turned to the Intendant General,
who barked:

"At Your Excellency's honorable orders, the change shall be
immediately made!"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, not to-night!" expostulated Hatzfeldt, with
graceful peevishness.  "I am horribly done up with the heat and the
dust we had on our way here.  Why should the King have dragged us to
Choissy-le-Roi, in order to see the troops?  Cannot he see troops
every hour of his existence?  Ah, by the way!  Did Your Excellency
notice that at Villeneuve St. George the bridge of boats had been
blown up?"

The Minister shrugged:

"Who can understand this destructive mania?  It is a national disease
peculiar to the French.  Since the beginning of the war, they have
destroyed bridges and railways to the tune of millions--for the sheer
pleasure, one would suppose, of building them up again.  Well, good
night!"  He held out his hand pleasantly to Hatzfeldt.  "Good night
to you, Herr Intendant General!"

The Intendant saluted stiffly and barked in his peculiar style:

"I wish a very good night to Your Excellency!"  Then he clanked down
the steps after Hatzfeldt and over the gravel walk to the front gate.

"I know what Count Paul has it in his mind to do," chuckled
Bismarck-Böhlen, looking after them.  "He will take a bath and dine
at the Hôtel des Réservoirs."

"It would not be a bad plan to follow his example," said the
Minister, "since some of the Foreign Office _fourgons_ may be late in
getting here.  Unless Madame Tessier is prepared to supply us with a
dinner upon the spur of the call?"

He added:

"Come, shut the hall door.  I see they have already placed sentries.
The grooms and Niederstedt will bring in the luggage by the back door
and up the servants' staircase."  He continued as Bismarck-Böhlen
obeyed: "They are particular about such matters in French houses,
where there is so much wax polishing of the floors and woodwork.
Where are the women? ... There were two.  A _bonne_ and her mistress,
the proprietress...."  His powerful glance fell upon them standing
near the doorway of the dining-room.  He motioned them to enter, and
followed them in.

"Madame Tessier!" he began, taking as by right the chair at the head
of the long shining dinner table, upon which the tapestry cloth had
not yet been replaced.  He looked at White Shawl.  The shrill voice
cackled:

"Madame Tessier is in Belgium....  I am Madame Charles Tessier, the
wife of Monsieur, her son!"

He said in his excellent French, laying on the table the flat white
Cuirassier cap he had removed on entering:

"I congratulate M. Tessier!  Can your servant cook, Madame?"

The shrill voice responded:

"Monseigneur must be judge of that when he has tried her dishes.  She
does her best--the excellent Jeannette!  But if Monseigneur is to be
served as befits his state and consequence ... I should prefer to
cook for him myself!"

"_So!_"  He leaned one elbow on the table, meditatively regarding the
speaker, and the lambent blue flame of humor danced and flickered in
his eyes: "Since we do not require you and your domestic to leave the
house--only to confine yourselves to the two smaller bedrooms on the
second floor--it may be as well that you should assist to a degree in
the kitchen....  But for all that does not require women we have our
servants--you understand?  And the _chef_ attached to the service of
the Prussian Chancellery is extremely competent.  He is--rather a
personage in his way!"

Bismarck-Böhlen sniggered in his characteristic fashion.

White Shawl shrilled, gesticulating with a hand that resembled a claw:

"If your Prussian cooks better than I do--or even the _chef_ of our
_gredin_ of an Emperor, he may call me a Bonapartist and I will not
slap his face!"

The Minister drew his well-shaped sunbrowned hand over his mustache,
perhaps to hide a smile at the epithet.  He asked with his powerful
glance intent upon Madame Charles Tessier:

"So, then, you are not a lover of the Bonapartes?  What is your
party?  Are you Republican or Monarchist?"

She shrieked with raucous energy:

"I am a patriot, and a citizeness of the French Republic!  All my
life I have execrated the Bonapartes.  See you well--I do not love
Prussians!...  But you have humiliated and dethroned this sacred pig
of a Napoleon....  And for that I could kiss the hand that received
his sword!"

The person to whom the shrill tirade was addressed listened with
imperturbability, although Bismarck-Böhlen, standing on the other
side of the table, between the windows, involuntarily clapped his
hands to his sorely sacrificed ears.

Now the Minister said in his suavest French accents:

"The hand was not mine, Madame, I beg to assure you, but that of the
King of Prussia, who is hardly likely to pay us a visit here....
Should His Majesty elect to do so, your ambition may be partially
gratified.  You will see the monarch who has paid your Imperial
bugbear so thoroughly well in his own coin."

Here Bismarck-Böhlen broke in....  "Excellency! ... talking of coin
... you told me to remind you of what happened the other day...."

"Ah, so I did!" said he.  "It is a mere coincidence, but worth
remembering....  Upon leaving the weaver's hovel, near the village of
Donchery, outside which you and Leverstrom waited while I discussed
the terms of the capitulation with Napoleon in a garret containing a
table, a bed, and two rush-bottomed chairs, the French Emperor
presented five pieces of gold to the weaver, which Leverstrom
afterward told me he vainly endeavored to buy of the man.  His
stupidity or the weaver's, we will not say now which was the
greater!...  But the coins displayed in unbroken sequence--the
portraits of five rulers of France.  There was Napoleon I.,
imperially wreathed, on a fine fat piece of 1820; a Louis XVIII.,
inane and aristocratic; a Charles X., with the knob in his nose; a
Louis Philippe, looking like a bourgeois, and Napoleon III., Emperor
of Ready-Made Plebiscites...."  He broke off to say: "And now,
Madame, what news of this dinner?  Can you supply it, or must we go
elsewhere?  Decide.  I am always an economist of time!"

And the penetrating glance shaded by the shaggy eyebrows of the
Minister questioned the meager peaked countenance of which merely a
wedge showed between the curtaining folds of the white shawl....
Lover of good cheer as he was, he was perhaps asking himself whether
a creature so mean and pinched-looking could set before him the
nourishing, well-flavored, well-cooked dishes, calculated to restore
energy to his giant's frame.  She was studying the face revealed in
the circle of light cast downward by the shaded lamps of the gasalier
above the dinner table, half loathing, half fascinated by the
tremendous personality now revealed.

How much the published portraits of the man lacked, she realized now,
clearly.  What mental and physical power, and force, and energy were
indicated in the lines of the great domed skull and the astonishing
frontal development.  What audacious courage and ironic humor were in
the regard of the full blue eyes that rested lightly upon her own
insignificance....  What deeply cut, pugnacious nostrils he had; what
a long stern upper lip the full gray mustache curtained!  He had a
cleft in his chin that reminded her of a friend she loved....

This last and the other characteristics of the visage that confronted
her were fuel to her roaring furnace of hate.  A baleful light blazed
in the eyes she curtained from him.  Her heart seemed a goblet
brimmed with intoxicating, poisoned wine.  And then a little thing
tamed the snake in her.  It drew in its quivering, forked tongue,
covered the fangs that oozed with venom, lowered its hooded head, and
sank down, palpitating among its cold and scaly coils.

With all its power, the profound weariness of his face had suddenly
come home to and arrested her.  He looked, as was indeed the fact,
like a man who had not known a good night's rest for weeks.  There
were sagging pouches of exhaustion under the masterful eyes, and the
lines about the forehead and mouth and jaws were deeply trenched with
fatigue and anxiety.  With pain, too, for he was suffering from
facial neuralgia brought on by nervous strain and overexposure, and
divers galls and blisters, the result of days spent in the saddle by
an elderly heavy-weight.  Now he yawned and leaned back in his
creaking chair, and suddenly was no despot helmed with terrors, armed
with power, mantled with ruthlessness, but a man fagged out, and
tired and hungry, athirst for rest and the comforts of home.

He had a wife living, she knew, and sons serving in the Prussian
Army.  Perhaps he had a daughter who loved him, too....  Perhaps she
was thinking of him ... praying for his return in safety....  Oh,
God!...  The dreadful thought was not to be tolerated....  It must be
driven away ... banished from the mind, if one was to carry out the
plan....

All these thoughts volted through the brain under the white shawl in
the passing of an instant.  The next, she heard the shrill voice say:

"It is for Monseigneur to decide!...  There is no difficulty about
dinner--that is, provided Monseigneur can eat a good soup of
artichokes made with cream!..."

His startlingly blue eyes laughed.  He acquiesced, seeming to snuff
the air with his deeply cut nostrils.

"There is nothing better than puree of artichokes--provided it serves
as the prelude to a solid, sustaining, and well-cooked meal."

White Shawl shrilled:

"There might follow a six-pound trout, boiled, with sauce _à la
Tartare_....  One came in this afternoon, fresh to a miracle, a fish
from the Gauche near Montreuil."

He said to Bismarck-Böhlen:

"The trout of the Cauche are capital eating ... especially those
caught in the upper part of the stream, a mile below Parenty.  What
else, Madame?"

She proclaimed in the raucous voice that made Bismarck-Böhlen grimace
and shudder:

"A dish of cutlets and a _ragoût_ of partridges with little cabbages.
It is now upon the fire, simmering in the casserole--I meant it for
next day!"

Like the trout, it had been designed for P. C. Breagh's delectation.

She added:

"And there are a cold ham, a peach tart, and a jelly of Maraschino,
and I could toss up a savory omelette to follow the sweet dishes.  As
for dessert ... we have pears and plums from the garden....  But,
Monseigneur..."  It was greed that made the woman's strange eyes
glitter so intolerably--"I shall be well paid for the excellent food
and all my trouble, shall I not, Monseigneur? ... In good French
money--not in Prussian notes?"

Under the heavy mustache he showed his sound, even teeth in a laugh
of enjoyment.

"In good French money.  You have my promise.  So--you do not like our
Prussian notes?"

White Shawl screamed:

"They are good where they come from, it may be, Monseigneur!...  But
here--the people would as soon take dead leaves for pay!..."

He thrust his hand in his breeches pocket, pulled out a gold
Napoleon, and threw it ringing on the shining table.  Her eyes
snapped.  The little clawlike hand darted from the folds of the
enveloping white shawl and pounced on the gold piece.  She curtsied
like an elder-pith puppet to the great figure sitting at the table
head, and with the extraordinary gait that combined a hitch, twist,
and shuffle, hobbled out of the room, shrilling as the door closed
behind her:

"Jeannette!  Jeannette!  Monseigneur will dine here!  Make you up the
kitchen fire!  I will go myself to the cellar and get the fruit....
And the wine ... Monseigneur will certainly require some wine!  Later
on you must help me get ready the bedrooms.  Put out sheets and
pillow cases to air!"

Bismarck-Böhlen was saying, as he followed his great relative into
the drawing-room, and extended himself upon the green plush sofa, as
the Minister selected the largest armchair, and lighted one of his
huge cigars:

"What a woman!  What a voice!"

The other laughed through the fragrant smoke rings:

"You could say no more and no less of an operatic _diva_, had you
recently fallen a victim to her charms.  My landlady pleases me.  My
tastes, as you know, are somewhat peculiar....  But you need not feel
anxious on the Countess's behalf.  My sentiments in this instance are
highly platonic."  He added, smoking and speaking almost dreamily:
"If in cookery Madame's performance equals her promise, what with
trout, and partridges _aux petit choux_--cold ham to fall back on,
and a savory omelette, we ought not to do badly at all!...  With half
a dozen bottles of that champagne we brought from Rheims, and a
little of the Epernay..."

He added, yawning and stretching his great limbs: "I am not usually
poetical, but I have a fancy with regard to the deep blue,
green-fleshed grapes of the country, that their color affects the
river into which the hillside vineyards drain.  The Marne water is as
brilliant and green as though it were made of melted emeralds.  And
the must from those grapes yields the best champagne of Rheims and
Epernay...."  He yawned again and went on: "There is something in
surroundings!  In this house I feel that I can work comfortably.  The
view of old trees, and bushes and flower beds from the room I have
chosen as a bedroom and study will make one feel almost at home.  Two
of my servants shall sleep upstairs in the attics--of which there are
several, and my coachman Niederstedt--who was my porter at the
Wilhelm Strasse, shall have a shakedown somewhere belowstairs.  He is
as strong as Goliath and as sharp as a needle.  An unusual
combination of qualities, because giants are supposed by little
people to be dull-witted and easily taken in!"

He sent out a long column of fragrant blue vapor, and added, looking
at the antique bronze clock surmounted by its grotesque bat-winged
shape: "A fallacy, since I myself belong to the family of the Anakim.
Do you observe that my landlady's familiar spirit appears to be
winking at what I have just said?...  Kobold or gnome, there is a
family resemblance between his countenance and Madame's.  I must get
her to sell him to me, to carry home to Berlin."




LXV

P. C. Breagh had gone back to his bedroom at the gardener's cottage,
under the garret where had slumbered the unlucky Jean Jacques Potier.
The pet rabbits of the young man were even now in a hutch in the
stable yard, and his striped house jacket and the green baize apron
he used to wear when cleaning the Tessier silver hung on a hook in
Madame Potier's closet, with the civil integuments of M. Potier, now
deceased.

It was too early to go to bed.  He pulled off jacket and waistcoat,
filled and lighted the venerable briar root, and, sitting on his bed,
re-perused by the light of his tallow candle a letter in headings,
and bearing the date of September 23rd, which may be reproduced as
written, here:

288 GREAT CORAM STREET, LONDON, W.C.

"MY DEAR YOUNG MAN!

  I WAS SURPRISED AND GRATIFIED

To Receive Letters dated respectively July 28th, 31st, August 4th,
11th, 26th, Sept. 5th, 19th, from:

  ONE WHO HAD VANISHED
  SWALLOWED ALIVE
  BY THE ROARING WHIRLPOOL OF WAR.
  THEY ARE SLAP-UP AND NO MISTAKE!
  ROBUST TO BRUTALITY!
  THEY HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED
  PUBLISHED AND PAID FOR!
  BY THREE SUBURBAN EDITORS
  SIMULTANEOUSLY.
  A NEW IDEA
  LONG CHERISHED
  BY SOLOMON KNEWBIT.
  A MAN BORN BEFORE HIS AGE!
  THE BOSS OF A FLEET ST. WEEKLY
  IS NOW NIBBLING AT
  'BANG!
  A DOG'S TALE.'
  I Have Recovered My Fifteen Shiners And Have
  Cash in Hand
  For My Young Swell
  WHEN HE COMES MARCHING HOME!
  MARIA SAYS
  YOU HAD BETTER LOOK SHARP!

  AN IMPORTANT CLUE
  DISCOVERED!
  MYSTERY OF LOST FORTUNE
  ABOUT TO BE CLEARED UP!
  ABSCONDING TRUSTEE
  HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED IN ECCENTRIC LODGER
  BY THE LANDLADY!
  PROOFS IN A SEALSKIN WAISTCOAT!
  BE READY!
  AT ANY MOMENT THE SUMMONS MAY COME!

  I remain,
      My dear young man,
          Truly and faithfully yours,
              SOLOMON KNEWBIT."


At the bottom of the last page was written in a curious up-and-down
handwriting:


"Dr mr Breagh,

"yu kno How mr Knewbit Has a Way of Puting Things queer but it Wold
be Best For you To Come Home it Realy Wold.  There Is a Pore Siner
only Wating To maik Amens wich Is Mind must alwais Have Bean weak and
People Puting There Afares in the Hands of sutch a Trustea Can ixpect
Nothing but Truble, mr Chown of Furnival's Inn is To Be let kno If He
Gives Warning to Leeve the House wich i think never will Drink being
got Hold of him to sutch an xtent dear mr Breagh you have thought you
were Pore.  But your Fortune of 7,000 lbs was only took awai by the
Almighty Goodness to Be Given back again, trust and beleive.  I am Dr
mr Breagh,

  "Respectfully and afexnly
      "Maria Ling."


P. C. Breagh folded up the pregnant pages--owing to Mr. Knewbit's
professional predilection for capitals and spacings, the double
letter covered a good number--and put them away and began to think.

Would it not be best that Juliette should return to her husband in
Belgium, since M. Tessier gave no sign of returning?  And whether she
agreed with the notion of leaving Versailles or not, was it wise of
P. C. Breagh to stay?

He loved her.  He would love her always.  There were times when her
eyes had tenderness in them for him.  Those unforgettable days passed
together ... those strange and dreadful sights seen in common, those
perils mutually encountered had made a bond between them that might
never be broken now.

But was it wise to remain near her, breathing her atmosphere,
drinking in her rare, delicate, exquisite beauty, and growing more
besotted in his worship of it with every day?  He knew that it was
not.  By the anguish the mere thought of leaving her cost him, he
realized how deeply the love of Juliette Tessier had taken root in
his heart.

His nature, as simple as hers was complex, made it easy to hold her
blameless in all.  She had not led him on.  They had been flung
together by force of circumstances.  That there was something
guileful in her very guilelessness never suggested itself to Breagh.

The gate bell pealed as he sat ruminating, causing him nearly to leap
out of his skin.  That M. Tessier had returned was the possibility
that instantly suggested itself.  He knelt by the window of the
low-ceiled cottage chamber and leaned out into the deepening dusk.

German voices at the gate, the stamping of horses, and the clinking
of bridles....  The grinding of heavy boots on gravel, the jingle of
spurs and the sound of scabbards scraping against the ground, rapping
against the steps.  A pause and a voice he knew said clearly and
resonantly:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble.  I will
interview the people of the house myself!"

A loud voice barked out something unintelligible to the listener,
ending with "insolence."  The voice of the Man of Iron returned:

"In that case, my Excellency will take the risk.  There are only
women in the house, and, should they offer violence, I have Count
Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here."

If there were any further words, the listener missed them, so
deafeningly loud was the drumming of the blood in his ears....  The
door was opened.  There was a gleam of something white in the dusky
hail place.  And _He_ entered and the other men followed him....
What did they there?  What was it best to do?...

Now one by one the upper rooms were illuminated.  The house door was
opening.  Two men came out and descended the steps.  One who walked
lightly and hummed a tune between the whiffs of his cigar passed
away, still humming, toward the Avenue St. Cloud.  The second who
trailed a clanking sword gave harsh-voiced orders in the staccato
tone of Prussian military authority to some persons in the street
outside, mounted a charger held by an orderly, and rode jingling away
toward the Boulevard de la Reine.  His helmet and his orderly's could
be seen bobbing over the top of the wall that screened the Tessier
house from the Rue de Provence, and the dark silhouettes of the heads
and bodies of men who crowded the double box seats of two private
luggage vans that waited beyond the _porte cochère_ under an escort
of cavalry.  No doubt they were _fourgons_ sacred to the traveling
Foreign Office of the Minister, bearing, besides the material of
diplomatic labor, a working staff of Chancery clerks.  Other vehicles
were waiting, and videttes of cavalry were posted at each end of the
quiet street.  The trampling of their horses could be heard
distinctly, with certain gruff admonitions, presumably addressed to
pedestrians desirous of using the thoroughfare.

Now the leaves of the _porte cochère_ were being opened and hooked
back by the dusky silhouettes of a couple of men.  Liveried grooms,
because of stray gleams of light flashed back from buttons and
cockades.  Light thrown by the blazing yellow lamps of a large,
empty, traveling landau that rolled in under the lozenged archway, at
the heels of a splendid pair.  The horses smelt of dust and sweat,
and whinnied as they whiffed the stables.  They were driven by a huge
coachman, and a second carriage followed, piled with luggage, and
containing three persons, who might have been secretaries or body
servants, one could not decide.  Four led horses followed, guided by
orderlies of Cuirassiers.  These did not follow the carriages, as
they turned up the short avenue and pulled up at the hall door.  The
orderlies, quite as though they knew the place, rode down the longer
gravel drive that ended at the gates of the stable yard.  One trooper
got down and opened the gates, and the eager horses were conducted in.

_Tramp, tramp, tramp!..._

A detachment of infantry, marching down the Rue de Provence.  Turning
in under the archway of the carriage entrance, an eighth company
belonging to a regiment impossible to specify, because of the
enfolding, deepening dusk.  They also smelt hot and dusty and
tallowy.  A subaltern was in command of them, and an under officer.
They halted, marked time while they posted a sentry at each of the
gates, then tramped on toward the gardener's cottage, and turned into
the Tessier stable yard.  They were going to bivouac there.  It was
all clear and plain and simple.  It was as fascinating as a shadow
play--but for the tragic element that mingled in.  Now the servants
and grooms were unloading the luggage from the carriages and
marvelously deft and noiseless they seemed at the work.  A little
later--and both carriages turned from the house, and were driven into
the stable yard.  You could hear the grooms and the big coachman
hissing as they unharnessed the weary horses, and the horses snorting
recognition as they scented their stable mates.  And then P. C.
Breagh became aware that the venerable pair of ponies that drew
Madame Tessier's basket carriage were not to be permitted to remain
in their comfortable loose boxes....  He could hear the elderly man
who groomed and fed and exercised the ponies vainly protesting at the
summary eviction of his charges, and the officer who commanded the
detachment of infantry--Green Rifles, as it turned out--answering his
complaints:

"Find the beasts another stable, and the rent and forage will be paid
for.  But remember!--if you grumble, His Excellency will have you
shot!"

And the ponies were led away in search of new quarters, as the
Foreign Office _fourgon_, with its escort of Uhlans, ground over the
trampled gravel and pulled up at the terrace steps.  One could hear
the voice of Madame Potier and the creaking of the Venetian shutters.
Then the billiard-room windows threw broad stripes of light across
the terrace toward the wall.  They were going to carry in the
dispatch boxes and light traveling safes, the copying presses and
letter books and the rest of the Foreign Office impedimenta by way of
the long windows....  One guessed whose idea that had been.

A dominating, transforming spirit had invaded the quiet house in the
Rue de Provence, bringing with it this purposeful, orderly bustle,
this disciplined irruption of elements strange and new.

Of all these servants and attendants, some would certainly take up
their abode at the gardener's cottage.  Would P. C. Breagh, like the
Tessier ponies, be presently turned out to seek cover elsewhere?

And Juliette....  The thought of her roused all his stinging
apprehensions.  He told himself that presently, when the house should
have resumed something of its normal quiet, he would steal across the
lawn in the shadow of the trees and borders, and lie in wait for a
glance ... for a word....

He would force her to leave at once for Belgium.  She must not remain
in the house with all these men....  The time crept by with maddening
slowness as he waited.  Dark shadows moved in lighted rooms, passing
across the blinded windows....  The whole house was flaring with
gaslight now.

How long....  The slatted Venetian shutters of the dining-room were
now unbarred and thrown open.  He could not see into the room by
reason that it faced east toward the pleasance, while the window from
which he watched looked southward, immediately commanding the hall
door.  But broad beams of light were thrown down the steps and across
the grass plot.  Tall shadows moved across the streaks at intervals.
There was the clatter of china, glass, and cutlery, a smell of
cooking delectably savory.  The Man of Iron was dining, and Hate had
spread the board.

A shudder went through Breagh, and a cold perspiration bathed him.
His hair seemed to rise and stiffen upon his creeping scalp.  A sound
broke from him ... perhaps a groan, perhaps an exclamation.  There
was a soft step in the darkness under his window and a whisper like a
sigh.

"Monsieur Breagh....  Do not descend!  It will be better that I mount
the stairs to you!"

His first impulse was to reassume the discarded coat and waistcoat.
Then he remembered that it was dark.  The floor creaked under his
stealthy footsteps as he reached the landing and crept on stockinged
feet down the narrow stairway.  She had pushed back the unlatched
door and passed into the tiny passage.  He met her almost on the
threshold, felt for and seized her little hands.  How feverishly hot
they were!  He pressed them as he whispered:

"I guessed what had happened!...  I know who has come here!...  For
hours I have been waiting my chance to get a word alone with you.  I
was just coming when I heard you under the window!"

She whispered--and, although her hands burned in his, they trembled
and her teeth chattered:

"Monseigneur de Bismarck desired to dine here.  Every day one does
not entertain a guest so noble.  See you well!  I have cooked for
Monseigneur with my own hands a dinner worthy of--himself!  He has
devoured like an ogre the trout _à la sauce Tartare_, and the
cutlets, and is now engaged upon a _ragoût_ of partridges.  When it
is time to fry the savory omelette that follows, Madame Potier will
ring the little bell, and I shall run back to the house."

The sentence ended in a stifled titter.  An ugly sound that sickened
Breagh as he heard it.  He pressed the small hands, whispering
entreatingly:

"Don't laugh!  You must not laugh.  Go back and get what you need for
a journey.  Tell Madame Potier I am taking you to Belgium.  Back to
your husband! ... your place is where he is!  You shall not stay here
... you must not, I forbid you!..."

She ceased to laugh and pulled her hands away from his.  Her answer
came: an inflexible utterance to be breathed so softly:

"I remain here, Monsieur, until my husband comes!"

He panted the old prayer:

"Juliette, for the love of God...!  You don't know what terrible
danger you are risking!..."

The reply fanned past his cheek like the velvety wing of some great
night moth:

"Monsieur, I remain here, until the arrival of M. Charles Tessier.
Although you will do wisely to depart while you may--unseen!"

He said between his gritted teeth, while the pounding of his heart
choked him:

"I shall stay here! ... I decline to be sent away!..."

She seemed to cogitate.  Then came the mere breath of an utterance.

"Will you swear to be secret and faithful?"

He said hoarsely:

"Juliette, I must first know what you intend to do."

She whispered, and her voice set his blood rushing and the fragrance
of her maddened him.

"Stoop!...  Why are you so tall?  Bend down your head!"

He stooped from his majestic altitude of five feet nine inches and a
bittock, and two little hands that scorched him clasped his neck
about.  Light and soft as the touch of a flower was the contact of
the mouth that whispered:

"I will tell you....  There is a line of one of your English poets--I
forget his name--but the words run like this....

  "'_Throw but a stone--the giant dies!_'


He gasped:

"I hear you!"

She whispered, still with her mouth against his cheek:

"See you well!--for the deliverance of my country, it is I who am
going to throw that stone!"

He panted through the shuddering that had seized him:

"Do you know what will happen, whether you succeed or fail?  You will
be led out--placed with your back against--this wall perhaps--and
shot!"

He felt her lips smile against his cheek as she answered:

"And what of that!  It will be the fortune of War!  But you..."  She
sharply drew her face away, and the slight hands thrust him from her.
"I will have you leave this place to-night!"

A weakness seized him.  He sank down upon his knees and stretched his
arms out, in the darkness, to the dimly outlined silhouette of the
slight elfin creature standing on the threshold, and the scents of
rose and jasmine came to him in gusts from the night-veiled garden
with another fragrance that had no name.  He whispered, driven beyond
himself:

"I will not go!  I love you!"

She said:

"I have nothing to do with Love--who have consecrated myself to
vengeance.  And your presence here might ruin all....  He knows M.
Breagh, the Englishman....  Have you not told me over and over that
once he..."

She broke off there.  But the intolerable stab brought Breagh to his
feet.  He snarled at her through his clenched teeth.

"He may know Breagh, the Englishman, but he doesn't know Jean Jacques
Potier.  Tell Madame that I shall wear her nephew's clothes and take
his name, and do his work about the house and garden.  All his duds
are in the cupboard up in my room there, and his apron and clogs and
so forth...."

Appalling triviality of the sex feminine.  The conjured picture
evoked a titter.  She breathed, and he was stung with rage to know
her shaken with irresistible mirth:

"But you do not know how to sweep and clean, and how can you conceal
your very red and curly hair?  French servant men have not such hair!
You will be betrayed by it, Monsieur!..."

His blood boiled, and he thundered in a whisper:

"I shan't!...  Call it what color you like to-night.  It won't be
there to-morrow!  There are clippers in the cupboard, and I shall
have it off."

A distant bell rang.  She was gone like a bat in the darkness.  His
word was given.  He was pledged now to follow her wherever fate
should lead.




LXVI

Versailles, always a town of martial music.  Royal or Imperial
fanfares of brass, and welcoming salutes of deep-voiced cannon, had
been--since a day early in October, when the girdle of iron and steel
had closed about Paris--resonant with Prussian bugle calls and
throbbing with Prussian drums.

From dusk to dawn the electric search ray now mounted on the summit
of the Arc de Triomphe, as the broad wheeling beams from Vanves,
Issy, Mont Valérien, and the whole ring of forts that guarded the
great, magnificent, menaced capital, whitened earth and sky in token
of the unsleeping vigilance of the Parisians, and their ceaseless
expectation of a German night attack, even as the long indicatory
fingers of brilliant blue-white light, stretching from the ridge of
St. Cloud and from the heights of Clamart, from Marly, Vanesse,
Epinal, Noiseau, Choisy, and Bourget--no less than the formidable
battery of big guns on the Place d'Armes, with their muzzles placed
so as to sweep the avenues radiating from the Château--betokened the
invaders' anticipations of yet another sortie.

Ah, why had there been no sortie earlier than that abortive effort
toward Chevilly on the thirtieth of September?  There were, at the
beginning of the Investment, no more than 180,000 German troops of
the Crown Prince's Army encircling Paris.  Up to the tenth of October
what a triumphant turning of the tables might have been effected by a
vigorous sally, effectively carried out!

Huge German forces were engaged in the sieges of Metz and Strasburg,
Belfort and Soissons, Schelsstadt and Verdun.  General von der Tann
was engaged with the Army of the Loire near Artenay.  The stubborn
resistance of Orleans kept an Army Corps of the Red Prince extremely
busy.  The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, with the right wing of the
Prussians' covering army south of Paris, was actively engaged with
the French at Dreux and Le Mans.

And there were 55,000 troops of the Line within the walls of Paris;
there were 105,000 Mobiles--not fighters to be sneezed at.  There
were 30,000 National Guards--perhaps too soft in muscle and
well-developed in the region of the corporation to be very
effective--pitted against such seasoned warriors as Schmidt, Klaus,
Kraus, and Klein.  But add to these, 25,000 Marines, Douaniers,
Gardes-Champêtres and Forestiers, and there you had a force of
485,000 trained Frenchmen, asking nothing better than to sally out by
St. Denis, Villejuif, and Charenton, cut the line of investment
north, clear the blocked road south, effect a junction with the Army
of the Loire, destroy the Warlock's subtlest combinations, promptly
raise the Siege of Paris, and deliver France from the invader.

What was Trochu, Military Governor of Paris, thinking about?  What
were MM. Ducrot and Vinoy doing, to delay until the garrison and
fortress of Strasburg were surrendered, until the Capitulation of
Metz on the twenty-seventh of October, and the fall of Verdun on the
seventh of November, had released the main Army of the Red Prince for
the strengthening of that steel and iron girdle that lay outside the
defiant ring of forts?  The tentative sally of the twenty-ninth of
November was foredoomed to failure from the outset.  No wonder Trochu
and his plans furnished hungry Parisians with abundant food for
mockery, when the Specter of Famine brooded over the City on the
Seine.  Narrow-eyed and tight-lipped, cold, sinister, and mysterious,
the man was a mere bag of wind, when all was said and done.

Meanwhile, the great bronze muzzle-loaders of the Forts of Mont
Valérien, Issy, Montrouge, Vanves, and Charenton, St. Denis and its
twin sisters, roared at intervals throughout each day, raining common
shell, chain shot, solid ball, and shrapnel into the lines of the
investing host.  But the trenching and battery-making went on
steadily; the high-walled farmyards and gardens of country houses in
the environs were being converted into emplacements for artillery of
the largest caliber.  Already several of Krupp's stupendous
siege-howitzers, with muzzles cocked at angles of forty-five,
demonstrated the possibilities of the bombardment for which the
German Press daily shrieked.

"_Not for the reduction of the military defenses, but to produce by
the exercise of sheer terror, bodily suffering, and destruction of
private property, such an effect upon the unarmed
multitudes--subjected to a hail of incendiary shells within their
encircling ring of walls and fortresses--as to compel the chiefs of
the Government and garrison to come to terms at command of the
popular voice._"

Thus the leader-writers of the _Berliner Zeitung_ and other
journals--peaceful-looking, stout men, with full beards and
short-sighted eyes behind spectacles--wrote, as though they longed to
dip their quills in newly shed French blood.

"It is sad, very sad," said the Warlock, vexed for once, "that the
siege trains conveying more than 100,000 hundred-weights of
ammunition cannot be brought over a single line of rails with
sufficient quickness to gratify these excellent gentlemen....  Yet
for the present we can do no more than invest the place and wait for
the means of attacking it.  The process of starving out is, as the
mighty fortress of Metz has shown, a very slow one.  But as the loud
voices of one hundred and one guns have already proclaimed to our
Berliners--the empty stomach triumphs over the most obstinate
resistance.  We now require an army to guard 300,000 prisoners of
War!  Since the Babylonian Captivity the world has not heard the
like!  And yet the chamber prattlers and the journalists accuse us of
tardiness.  Already from several anonymous quarters have reproachful
or ridiculing letters reached me.  One even contains a villainous
comic verse, which I am told is sung in the music halls in Berlin."

And the great tactician read, with the expression of one who savors
the bouquet of sulphureted hydrogen or asafetida:

  "_Guter Moltke, gehst so stumm?
  Immer um das Ding herum:
  Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm,
  Mach' doch endlich: Bumm, bumm, bumm!_"


And he tore up the rude verses in indignation and threw them into the
waste-paper basket of the Prussian Great Headquarters at the Palais
de Justice, on the right of the Prefecture, and strode downstairs,
too much out of tune to hum.

To have been called slow and stupid, and affectionately urged to
hurry up and make an end of things with bang, bang, banging!...  He
was almost glad that his departed Mary was not alive to know of the
humiliation inflicted by these scurrilous rhymesters on her beloved
old man.

It was an unfortunate moment chosen by a new junior assistant
_aide-de-camp_ upon the Chieftain's personal staff, for tendering a
request for leave of absence until the following day.

"What, what?...  You have barely entered upon your new and important
duties, the wine in which your comrades of the Guard pledged you is
still bubbling in your veins....  Is it another congratulatory
banquet, or a supper _tête-à-tête_ ... Am I right?"  The Warlock's
keen glance glittered between his lashless eyelids at the tall,
fair-headed young officer standing rigidly before him.  "_Prut!_ that
reminds me!..." he added.  "In whose company did I see you lunching
only yesterday at one of the little round tables in the ante-chamber
of the dining salle at the Hôtel des Réservoirs?"

Said Valverden, his blue eyes meeting the sharp gray glance with a
charming candor:

"Excellency, the lady is the recently married wife of a Roumanian
noble.  Her name, if Your Excellency desires to know it, is Madame de
Straz."

Said the Field Marshal with an acute look and a dry intonation:

"In Berlin, not so long ago, she called herself something else!"

Valverden answered, with a conscious side glance at the twist of
silver braid that marked his rank of Captain:

"Her first husband was killed in action with his regiment at
Gravelotte.  She is now legally married to M. de Straz."

Moltke took snuff and said laconically:

"She has not taken long in changing her state."

Valverden began, rather lamely:

"Madame had virtually been separated from M. de Bayard----"

Like a bayonet thrust came the retort:

"Since your Cousin Max ran away with her from Paris, fourteen years
ago!  The woman is an adventuress, whom you will be wise to avoid."

Valverden answered, with his disarming look of frankness:

"Your Excellency, I was applied to by the person you mention for
advice in a matter of serious urgency.  Madame de Straz has unhappily
lost all trace of the whereabouts of her daughter, Mademoiselle de
Bayard....  She has entreated me to solicit for her an audience with
Your Excellency, in the hope that you might aid her to recover the
young girl."

The War Eagle croaked, ruffling his feathers with indignation:

"Does the woman suppose that I have got the unfortunate young
creature in my pocket?  Or does she suspect you of knowing where she
is to be found?"

Valverden said, hastily and flushing:

"Your Excellency, upon my honor, I have never seen the girl!"

The Warlock tucked away his snuff box and pointed the terrible
withered finger at the left side of the young man's bosom, where hung
upon a broad black, white-bordered ribbon a cross of dark metal,
edged with a narrow line of silver, and bearing a crown and the
letter "W."  A terrible grating voice said, and with all his cool
effrontery Valverden quailed at the words and the stern look that
accompanied them:

"To you, young man, upon whom the Second Class of the Iron Cross has
been conferred by the hand of your Crown Prince, for daring and
gallantry upon the war field--no more I say than this: Do nothing to
disgrace the wearer of that decoration--which should be sacred in
your eyes...."  He added: "The leave you ask is granted.  Until
twelve noon to-morrow, Captain von Herding will take your place."

And His Excellency the Field Marshal returned his aide-de-camp's
salute and wheeled sharply, and had taken a couple of strides across
the vestibule, when he halted to ask:

"This girl you speak of--how came she lost?..."

Said Valverden, hesitating slightly:

"According to Madame her mother, the ladies were on a visit to Rethel
during the time when the Prince Imperial of the French was staying at
the Prefecture.  They had obtained an audience of the Prince....
Madame de Straz was prevented by illness from accompanying her
daughter....  The young lady--Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard--has
never been seen since."

The lean neck and spare features of the greatest of strategists
became suffused with indignant scarlet.  He said:

"The mother is a trollop of the very first water.  She took the girl
to the Prefecture--why did she contrive an interview?  She sends her
up alone--she declares that she has never since seen her....
_Pfui!..._  The affair, in my nostrils, fairly stinks of vulgar
intrigue.  Have no more to do with it--though the unlucky girl is no
doubt to be pitied....  I will speak to His Excellency, Count
Bismarck, who has agents in Rethel."

And he steamed across the marble vestibule of the great hall of the
Palais de Justice, crossed the Place des Tribunaux, and vanished into
the Prefecture, over whose entrance hung the Hohenzollern banner and
the Prussian standard, that was very soon to show a stripe of red
beside the black and white....

For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse had joined
the Bund.  The King of Saxony had signed,--Würtemburg would sign the
treaty of Federation shortly.  There were prospects of a definite
settlement with the King of Bavaria.  The ambition of the Man of Iron
was shortly to be realized....  Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!


You might have seen him, upon this bland November morning that had
succeeded a night of shrieking northerly gusts and driving pelts of
sleety rain, walking with the Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the
Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence.  The house immediately
opposite had now been converted into a guard post.  Sentries in the
uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates.  Over the
principal entrance hung the black and white Prussian standard.

The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds sailing toward
the northeast.  The leaves that yet remained upon the elms and
poplars shone in the sunshine like newly minted gold.  Those that the
gale had stripped lay in wet drifts upon the grass and gravel, though
the three oak trees on the pleasance yet retained their suits of
crisping russet brown.

To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man servant was
sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the narrow terrace of steps
running round three sides of the building.  The swish of his birch
broom punctuated the sentences of the newspaper article being read by
Hatzfeldt to his Chief.

It was the continuation of the article in the _Berliner Zeitung_ that
had roused the ire of the Warlock a little while before.

"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of Humanity, we
demand that this measure be taken at once.  We reprehend in the
sternest terms, not only those military commanders who are in favor
of procrastination.  We cry in the ears of the
Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count Bismarck himself, who is
credited with being the main factor in this policy of delay: _Mene,
mene, tekel upharsin!_--'Thou art weighed in the balance, and found
to want!'"

Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:

"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of
journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I
should be inclined to believe she had written this."  He added: "I
have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an
excess of tenderness is something quite new to me.  How shall we
reassure these excitable gentlemen?  Buschlein"--he referred to his
Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous
"Recollections"--"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from
Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections
for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that
he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control
over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's
investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."

He spat and resumed:

"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I am really averse
to the bombardment, and why I won't allow firing into the town?  What
pernicious rubbish!  They will be blaming me next for all losses
during the investment.  Which are not small; for in little
skirmishes, and during the short time occupied by those abortive
sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done had we
regularly stormed the place."

He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome,
_débonnaire_ countenance invariably fell at any reference to a
bombardment:

"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters from Paris,
some of which I have already read, and a Figaro of yesterday's date.
It has been decreed by the French Government that all wine and
provisions are to be taken away from private people, as the poorer
classes have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats.
So your American father-in-law will have to look out for his
cellar--an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from you.  And
your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably be made into
cutlets--a pretty piece of intelligence for your next letter to
Madame!"

"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried Hatzfeldt, with
ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore you not to conjure up the
image of my wife's indignation and despair.  Every letter I receive
from her begins and ends with her precious ponies."

The Minister appended:

"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is living at their
estate of Petit Val, near Marly--I think you told me--being
sandwiched in between the little beasts."

They were pacing the garden paths.  The Chancellor had recently
risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood.  He continued,
throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:

"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no more _pâté_ of
pheasants, or sausages.  Pray tell her, with my compliments, that
both were excellently fresh and good....  Did you notice written on
my table card that the Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute
interview before M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve?  If I have
not polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up the
doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and his gold
spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation below here for an
instant--do not send him up straightway to the torture cell."  Thus
the Minister had christened the small room adjoining his private
apartment.  He went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with
his white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a string of
tales about our orgies and revelings, of the enormous expense of
which the Mayor is coming to complain."

"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.

"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost the town too
much to keep, the chief offenders being the grand ducal and princely
personages at the Hôtel des Réservoirs.  Of course, one knows that
the Tinsel Rabble eat and drink a great deal more than they require,
and waste much more than they consume.  But to a Frenchman, one
cannot admit as much.  So I shall tell the Mayor that he must apply
to the French Government at Tours for permission to raise a
substantial money loan, and as M. Thiers has only just come from
there, he would naturally buttonhole the old gentleman if he
encountered him.  Which--as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is
as timid as a hare and as soft as a baby--would discompose him very
horribly...."  He continued: "He is dying to make peace with us,
because there will soon be famine in Paris.  Imagine how I caught him
out when I told him yesterday: '_Monsieur, you have only visited the
city for a few hours.  We know better about the contents of its
magazines than you do.  They have ample provisions to last until the
end of January...._'  What a look of incredulity!  I had only been
feeling his pulse, as it were....  His amazement told me what I most
wanted to know.  What a man to make a bargain about an armistice, an
invalidy civilian, who cannot conceal his feelings!  Who lets himself
be put out of countenance and pumped!--actually pumped!"

He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate copiously....
"There!" he said, wiping his mustache vigorously with a large white
cambric handkerchief.  "You see what it is to have a stomach as
sensitive as mine is....  That injustice done me in the _Berliner
Zeitung_ with reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of
bile, by which I was already incommoded.  Thiers will be certain to
remain closeted with me for two hours.  He is nothing if not
expansive and flowery, and redundant.  I shall not be able to get on
horseback before three o'clock, and we dine at six."  He went on,
punctuating the sentence with more coughs and hawkings: "And as our
table is to be graced--_tchah!_--by a huge trout pasty, a love gift
to the Chancellor of the--_hah!_--Confederation, from a Berlin
restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain--_ahah!_--a cask of
Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with his wife
and--_brr'r_!"

He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending, resuming, as he
used the big white handkerchief:

"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome....  More
bile!...  I spat like this half the night through....  Decidedly I am
not as well as when we galloped along the highroads with the Great
Headquarters Staff....  I have wondered: Do I eat too much?  Does
this sedentary life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and
answered himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple of
eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk?  I don't
lunch--lunch is a mockery of a meal--but in the evening I make a
hearty dinner.  With beer and champagne in plenty, and wash all down
with half a dozen cups of tea.  Then I go to bed--as you know, never
before midnight.  There's a doze--and I waken up with my brain as
bright as daylight--all sorts of things running through it, and my
mouth full of this bitter--_faugh!_"

"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said Hatzfeldt,
slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously crumpled the soiled
cambric into a ball.  "Shall I send Your Excellency's servant to
fetch another?"

"No, no!  As it happens, I have sent Grams out.  And Engelberg is
busy.  There is Madame Charles's factotum!"  He called in French:
"_Hola_, Jean Jacques!  Approach, my brave young man!"

His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and biliously
injected, had turned to where the strongly built young male servant
was still sweeping the steps of the rear of the house.  Cropped to
the scalp, you saw the fellow attired in a well-worn morning jacket
of striped linen, a blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers,
yellow piped at the side seams.  Summoned by an imperative word and
gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood it up
against the side of the conservatory, and shambled to where the
Chancellor was standing, muttering with a downcast air and a furtive,
sulky look:

"_Ouiche, Monseigneur?..._   What is it Monseigneur desires?"

Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great mustache and
showed the white, square teeth that a young man might have envied:

"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean Jacques would
betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame Charles Tessier of her
goodness to favor Monseigneur with a clean handkerchief....  Perhaps
two would be better....  Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy
legs to rapid motion, for to _croquer le marmot_ is not a favorite
pastime with Monseigneur!  Comprehend you?"

Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a bow of the
clumsiest:

"_Ouiche, Monseigneur!_"

"_De quel pays sont vous?_" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.

Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:

"_La Suisse, Monsieur!_"

Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene of his
abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went round the end of the
conservatory toward the kitchen quarters:

"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or Swiss because
they are too funky to fight!"

Said the Minister:

"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this fellow, describes
him as a native of Neufchâtel.  Here she comes herself, bringing my
handkerchiefs.  Thank you a thousand times, Madame!  But why
inconvenience yourself?"

Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with white, was
crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets, parted in the middle,
and brushed down in two old-fashioned festoons on either side of her
haggard white wedge of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it
was no trouble whatever....  The laundress's basket with
Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.

Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff, antique
material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of
the expansive skirt, and upon the sleeves and waist.  It had been
discovered in a wardrobe belonging to the mother of M. Charles
Tessier.  She had on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her
black silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel
beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray curls of
her respected mother-in-law.  Over her narrow shoulders hung the
inevitable white woolen shawl.

She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to Count
Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and disappeared round the
corner of the ivy-bordered path.  Seen thus in the searching
daylight, the elevation and forward thrust of the left shoulder that
lent her gait its unpleasant peculiarity, and the curvature in the
lower part of the spine were even more painfully apparent.  It
occurred to her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes,
reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this
deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality upon
herself.

She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the November
sunshine.  Round the corner of the green glass conservatory, well out
of sight of those who walked in the garden, Jean Jacques Potier was
shivering, too.

When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat again, the knees of
Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him.  His heart had sunk like a
leaden plummet, and the sweat of terror had started on his skin.

He was afraid--horribly afraid.  Not for himself, but for another.
There was no knowing.  The thing he feared might happen at any time.

"_Throw but a stone--the giant dies!..._"


He could hear now the very voice in which she had added: "See you
well, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"

He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the object of
turning Juliette from her purpose.  He did not know whether he had
succeeded.  She would give him no promise.  She was sphinxlike,
inscrutable....  You could never feel sure that in the middle of the
night there would not be a cry--and then a commotion of running feet
upon the stairs, and then--the arrest, and the accusation.  He had
made up his mind to say, when that happened: "_It was my doing.  She
knew nothing about it.  It was I who put poison in the food of this
man!_"

Then he would be taken out and shot.  It would be done instantly,
whether the owner of the life that had been attempted died or got
well.  Perhaps the man would not die?  He had an iron constitution
and the frame of a Titan.  But sometimes he looked weary and haggard
and bilious.  And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths
over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of P. C. Breagh
would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs would shake under
him, as they were shaking now.




LXVII

Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:

"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she does not fear
damp, that is quite plain ... see how she trails her skirts over the
wet grass.  Now, if she were to show her feet, should we be grateful,
or the reverse?"

A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes as he noted
Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he spoke.  He went on:

"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands that are exquisite.
Have you ever looked closely at the hands of Madame Charles?  If not,
I recommend them to your notice.  They are well worth looking at."
He added, ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose
that we follow her--discreetly and at a distance.  I have still a few
minutes before the Mayor arrives."

He led the way.  They crossed a portion of the lawn and turned into a
gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over with wet and rotting
leaves.  The shining patent-leather boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by
their contact.  The Chancellor, observing this, said:

"Never mind....  You can have them cleaned!  My man Niederstedt
polishes boots capitally!"

Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:

"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes.  But never
again will they be the same after a wetting.  And they are made by
the only man in the world who knows how to make boots."

The Minister said brutally:

"Order another pair of the fellow!"

Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:

"He lives in Paris--Rue de Lafayette.  And Your Excellency is going
to have Paris bombarded!"

Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal laughter:

"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of their own heads
know a great deal better than that....  According to them, I am a
humanitarian--altruistic to imbecility."

"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation, know Your
Excellency better than they!"

The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the impending
destruction of his bootmaker's establishment, incensed Hatzfeldt to
the point of an imprudent retort.

The granite face turned.  The heavy regard rested upon him.  With his
characteristic stutter--a signal as warning to those who knew him as
the rattle of the _crotalus_ hidden in the brake, the Minister said:

"So I am not a philanthropist, or a--or an apostle of light and
sweetness.  I would prefer to build an Empire with the fallen towers
of the modern Babylon?..."

Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the Russian Princess,
his mother.  The Minister went on in a lighter tone:

"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on the highest
branches.  They were bigger and sweeter and rosier than the others,
though in stealing them I risked both my breeches and my neck.  Well!
To be plain, there are two apples just now that I particularly covet:
the Bombardment--and the Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany from
the Tuileries...."  He added: "The _via media_ is not the surest road
to an arrangement that shall be lasting.  The most convincing
arguments are uttered by the iron mouths of big guns!"

They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden.  The
patch of green still spread upon the eastern boundary wall, where the
water trickled down.  The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the
tiny pond cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his Infanta,
but the pipe remained unsoldered because the plumber's men had gone
to the War.  Thus the Satyr's mouth remained dry, though the chuckle
still sounded in the Satyr's throat.

Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the Minister and
his courtly First Secretary stepped into the open.  She started
slightly, glanced round, bent her head, and limped painfully away.

Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward, misshapen
figure:

"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to look over the
garden wall!"

Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise.  He objected:

"It would hardly be possible.  The wall must be eight feet high, and
how in the world could a woman, elderly and with that distressing
deformity----"

The laugh that shook the great figure beside him puzzled as much as
the utterance.

"She is a daughter of Eve--and it would be possible, by putting a toe
in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman, to ascertain that I have
had two sentries posted on the other side of this wall.  Listen!..."

He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he habitually
carried, and an answering rap came from the other side.

"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an unoccupied
house," he added.  "And ranged along the wall are bushes, behind
which my two men stand well screened."

"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that quarter?" inquired
Hatzfeldt.

"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the safe side, and
Versailles is pretty well packed with people by whom I am rather
particularly detested.  But as a fact, I placed the soldiers for the
purpose of catching Madame's postman.  You did not perceive as we
stepped out of the shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this
creature's mouth?"

Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:

"Why, no, Your Excellency.  I saw nothing of the kind!"

The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret laughter:

"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for seeing some things
at a distance....  A pretty face behind a thick veil ... a graceful
figure concealed by a shawl.  Possibly the friend who communicates
with Madame Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires
her....  There is no accounting for tastes...."

Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:

"Who is Madame Charles's friend?  Is it possible that misshapen
creature has a lover?"

The Minister answered with a curious grimace:

"A lover who is apparently a _Franc-tireur_."

Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:

"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a black cloth uniform,
and carry a black standard with a skull above a pair of crossbones.
Perhaps his lady-love sat for the picture of the Death's head?"

The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:

"Possibly she did....  Though there have been moments when, under
Madame's extraordinary coiffure with the black lace lappets, I have
seen peeping at me--imagine what?"

"I cannot imagine....  Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.

"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue eyes...."  The
Minister went on: "But not only hatred....  Youth, and prettiness.
Now, look here, and--for I am perfectly convinced that you believe me
bewitched by our landlady--behold my rival's _billet-doux_!.."

Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter.  The Minister put his
hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted therefrom a little
envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky scrawl.

"_To My Adored Wife._"

The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held the
superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly proceeded to
open the envelope....  Hatzfeldt, at first crimson, and writhing with
repressed merriment, became graver as the Minister read aloud:


"_What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that are sleepless
and solitary.  Credit, my little one, that thy Charles is often near.
In the thought of thy husband, if not in person, he rests upon thy
heart so faithful and fond._"


Hatzfeldt spluttered.  The reader continued:


"_We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig Hussars the
other day at the village of Hably....  We shot down many of the
Prussian marauders and killed their horses.  Only eleven escaped with
life.  They returned later and burned the village, committing
unexampled brutalities, and murdered several of the inhabitants.  It
is well!  We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate._

"_All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war waged upon a
merciless invader.  We number nobles, peasants, citizens, criminals
in our armed and organized ranks.  Each man will kill as he knows
best.  The rifle, the knife, the scythe, or the cudgel, the
gardener's shears, the chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are
weapons lawful to be used against the enemies of France.  We will dig
wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by method and
wreck scientifically.  We will tumble them down wells, drown them in
rivers, burn the huts they are sleeping in over their heads.  And our
sisters?--our wives?  They are united with us in our solemn compact
of destruction.  They will embrace to strangle.  They will smile and
stab!  They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les Prussiens, and
the dogs will eat of them and die._

"_These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids.  These for thy two little
hands.  Dost thou love me?  Till death and after,_

  "_Thine and thine only,
      "Charles Tessier._"


There was a silence.  The Minister broke it with a grim sentence:

"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he is making love
to his spitfire of a wife.  A fine breed of young criminals should
spring from such a union!"

The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment on the speech.
The Minister had deftly opened the envelope without tearing the flap,
which was still moist.  He now refolded and slipped back the sheet
into the envelope, wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from
the hole in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the
envelope.  He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the clocks of
Versailles struck the half hour, and said to Hatzfeldt, replacing the
watch:

"Half-past twelve....  Do you know, I read something by Félix Pyat
very like this"--he slightly waved the drying envelope--"in a copy of
the _Petit Journal_ that was brought me the other day....  Now, my
Mayor is due, and M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels....  I
must return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed here."

"Here, Excellency!"

The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.

"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello....  Frankly, I
cannot understand why Madame Charles herself placed this letter in
the gape of the mask....  I am curious to know who will fetch it away
from there....  I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and
find out."

Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall.  The Minister nodded.

"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see through these
bricks.  Really, I must ask you to stay here and oblige me.  Von
Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play instead of you....  Why, you are
quite pale!..."

Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:

"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation.  I am regularly shaved
by a Frenchman, you understand!...  And these _Francs-tireurs_ seem
to be everywhere.  Really, it is horrible!"

The Minister's brow became thunderous.  The lines about his mouth
hardened to granite.  He said in his grimmest tone:

"They should be hanged whenever found!  And not cut down, but left
hanging, for a salutary warning to other rascals....  Do you know
that the _Combat_--the organ edited by that blackguard Félix
Pyat--wishes to get up a subscription for the purchase of a
gold-mounted rifle to be given to the scoundrel who succeeds in
removing the Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price
upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck.  Well--_Auf
Wiedersehen_!  Ride out with me after lunch to the aqueduct of Marly,
and tell me what I want to know."

And the great figure strode away, leaving the First Secretary to his
unwelcome task.

"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated his graceful
figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and the rich soil, rendered
marshy by the overflow of the lily pool, squashily gave way beneath
his once immaculate boots.  "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom
that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the Foreign
Office _chef_ with the cooking!  The Chief swears by her _ragoûts_
and her omelettes and her _beignets_.  They are certainly
excellent....  I must avoid them for the future.  A young married man
with a family must be careful.  I wonder, if anything unpleasant
happened, whether Touti would marry again?"

The bushes were wet with rain.  Little cold showers sprinkled the
dandy's head and shoulders.  His boots sank deeper as the wet
trickled down his neck.  What a degrading task for a First Diplomatic
Secretary!  With what shrieks of laughter his lively American
Countess would read his written description of his experiences as a
spy!  A corn began to shoot.  He sneezed.  This meant influenza to a
certainty.  Even while he devoted Madame Charles, her bloodthirsty
spouse, and all her countrymen to the hottest corner of Tophet, he
kept a bright lookout.  And in another five minutes or so he saw the
person for whom he lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path
that wound through the shrubbery.

It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes and blunders
kept the Prussian Chancery attendants in a continual eruption of
abusive German epithets, and whose _patois_, proclaimed to be Swiss,
was so extremely puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon
an exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only assign
the youth to a canton of his own.  He thrust his hand into the
Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the letter, twisted a wry mug as
he regarded it, and said, with an admirable English accent:

"Oh, damn!..."

Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen regions, he
thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped cotton jacket and
scampered back to the house.

You will remember that when Juliette had consented to marry the
unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear Colonel's very sake,
adorned the faceless one with features, a complexion, shoulders,
muscles, and so on.  She had even boasted to Monica's brother of the
swordsmanship of the worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer,
whose most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of thrushes
and sparrows, which he would bring home to the Rue de Provence in
triumph, to be converted by his adoring mother into savory pies.

Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps to relieve the
strain of an otherwise unbearable situation--possibly with the desire
of inflicting on her unfortunate adorer the torturing pangs of
jealousy, or possibly to create and maintain in herself a fictitious
interest in the supposititious husband, she had begun anew to
expatiate upon his gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not
leave off.  Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a
blunt nose, and a square chin with a dent in it.  He was pale, with
melancholy black eyes and a high brow.  His jetty mustache was waxed,
his imperial finished in a point of the most elegant....  He quoted
poetry in a deep voice, and was capable of torrential outbursts of
passion.  He was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of
Balzac's beautiful young man.

Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had become restive, to
the point, one day, of being clumsily sarcastic on the immunity of
widows' only sons from the obligation of military service, and so on.

That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious communication
to the effect that her lord had secretly quitted Belgium, penetrated
in disguise into France, passed through the Prussian lines in a
series of hairbreadth escapes, and joined a corps of
_Francs-tireurs_.  Since when, letters containing tirades inspired by
the most flaming patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure,
and passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at intervals
by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask.  Of late, since she
had developed nervousness about fetching the letters herself, Jean
Jacques had sulkily performed the office.  And when she did not, with
due precautions, declaim these effusions for the benefit of her
victim and fellow conspirator, his was the task--inconceivably
repulsive to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading
them aloud to Madame Charles.  Hence the expletive which had betrayed
his British nationality to Count Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in
his squelching patent leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa
trees.




LXVIII

From Tours, chief town of the Department of the Indre et Loire, 120
miles southwest of Paris as the crow flies, where Cremieux, Minister
of Justice, and rather too doddery to be of efficiency at this
crisis, had established the Administrative of the Provisional
Government of the new French Republic;--whither M. Leon Gambetta,
Minister of the Interior, Member of the Board of National Defense,
had recently betaken himself, escaping from the besieged capital to
Montdidier as a passenger in the car of a balloon--whither the
veteran Garibaldi had now arrived to offer his services in the cause
of Liberty--from Tours had come the famous diplomat and man of
letters, contemptuously dubbed "Professor" by Count Bismarck, with
the object of carrying out the peace negotiations in whose conduct
the tragic patriarch Favre had broken down.

You saw the famous Minister and author of the _Histoire du Consulat
et de l'Empire_, as a little, stocky, black-clad old gentleman with a
square gray head, round, clean-shaven face, and bright, round eyes,
looking through gold-rimmed spectacles....  Above all, a patriot,
heart and soul devoted to France, the position of this famous French
statesman of seventy-five, newly returned, empty of all but fair
words and vain courtesies, from a pilgrimage to the Courts of various
neutral Powers, was horrible and painful beyond words.

Sad, distracted, anxious little gentleman, charged with the mission
of obtaining those needed terms of peace, or at least an armistice
from the conqueror upon the threshold, can you see him, in the shadow
of the magnificent Temple erected by the Sun King, toiling and
moiling with his secretary, the younger M. Remusat, in preparation
for those anguish-fraught interviews with the German Chancellor.

The tables of his sitting-room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs were piled
with books and papers--papers covered with abstruse calculations
dealing with the most urgent need--the provisioning of Paris--papers
dealing with the question of the Elections--papers dealing with the
General Census--papers of every imaginable kind.  And with these,
from dawn till midnight, the little, grief-worn man wrestled while
the Tinsel Rabble and their staffs of German officers reveled in the
dining-saloons, and trampled and shouted and clanked and jingled up
and down the corridors, and in and out of the bedrooms; and the roar
of the guns from the forts of the beleaguered city shook the windows
from time to time.

Now and then he would lie back exhausted in his chair, or lie down
and sleep, if sleep ever visited him.  He took his frugal meals in a
private cabinet opening out of the great dining-hall of the
restaurant.  Since the thirtieth of October he had been engaged in
this wise, save when, having been first compelled to apply to Count
Bismarck for a pass and a military safe-conduct, he would meet and
confer with Favre, or one of his other colleagues, at some chosen
spot without the walls of the beleaguered capital.

Only the previous day he had trundled down in a little, shaky, hired
brougham to the half-ruined and wholly deserted suburb of Sèvres,
preceded by an officer of Uhlans with a White Flag on a pole.

Day after day the little brougham had drawn up before the modest
house in the Rue de Provence, and the little gentleman, whose head
seemed to whiten perceptibly, had stepped out with his portfolio
under his arm, as now.  Day after day the Chancery footmen would open
the door to him, and Madame Charles Tessier, hovering in the
background, would drop the representative of suffering France her
lowest curtsey, and sometimes gain a brief word with his unfailing
bow and smile.  To-day, as Major von Keudell appeared in the doorway
of the drawing-room--the Chancellor being closeted in his private
interviewing-room upstairs with the Republican Mayor of
Versailles--the little gentleman said simply, offering his hand to
the eccentric-looking person in the cap with lappets and the white
shawl:

"The sympathy that is expressed in looks and by silence can be very
eloquent and very touching.  From my heart I thank you for yours,
Madame!"

And as she had burst out sobbing and kissed the hand, he had drawn it
away with a murmured protest, and had passed on into the drawing-room
where Von Keudell was to hold him in conversation until the Mayor had
been polished off.

But M. Thiers had endured the ordeal with a courteous kind of
resignation, only looking at his watch from time to time, or glancing
at the clock over which presided the horned, bat-winged,
cloven-hoofed and tailed figure that tickled the fancy of his
oppressor so much.

"His Excellency expected me," he said.  "There has been no mistake
about the time of the appointment--named by himself at our previous
interview.  The greatness of the interests concerned are
apprehensible by His Excellency!"

The mild sarcasm rebounded pointless from Von Keudell's bluff
rejoinder:

"No, no mistake at all.  His Excellency has merely shifted the hour.
From half-past twelve to a quarter to one--His Excellency found it
more convenient."

"What boors are these Germans!" thought the angered diplomat,
writhing, as some medieval victim, condemned to undergo torture by
rack and fire, might have writhed at the delay of the hideous ordeal.

And then the door opened.  The Chief Torturer looked in with the
salutation:

"A pleasant day!  I am quite at your service now, if you will come up
to me....  You know the way, I think?..."

And the great figure vanished, and the heavy footsteps thundered up
the drugget-covered stairs.

Did the sorrowful visitor know the way to the torture-chamber?
Surely malice must have prompted the query addressed to the
unfortunate plenipotentiary of France.

The room he had so loathed had one window looking out on the Rue de
Provence, and another at the south side of the house, where stood the
pine-tree and the turtle-backed green glass conservatory with the
wrought-iron bridge above it.  It had a figured gray carpet, a green
hearthrug with red edges, dark green stuff curtains, and various
oil-paintings and steel engravings hung upon the walls, which were
painted coffee-tinted cream.  It was furnished with a writing-table,
on which were a terrestrial globe, a celestial one, and a tellurion,
a large gray marble-topped chiffonier, a sofa covered with chintz,
pattern red-and-gray birds-of-paradise on a background with
palm-leaves; two cane chairs and a round center-table, upon which lay
a platter of wood containing the colored glass marbles with which one
plays the game of solitaire.

It was a game of solitaire which was played in that stiff,
primly-furnished apartment, in one corner of which stood a mahogany
bedstead of Empire pattern, with an obsolete drapery of green-figured
brocade.  Such a game as may be played by a grim, greedy,
gray-mustached Grimalkin with a plump, bright-eyed,
feebly-palpitating mouse.

M. Thiers had been gravely imperiled by the shell-fire of the French
guns in the act of returning from Sèvres on the previous day, a
mischance which had increased the palpitations which were caused by
his heart disease, and wounded his feelings cruelly.  Commented the
Chancellor, to whom he unwisely related the episode:

"Fortunately the cab-horse was too ill-fed to bolt, but the window
was broken, and you were mud-splashed all over....  Not exactly the
first time that your countrymen have treated you in that way!..."

And this first scratch of the claw that never failed to draw blood
was followed by the query whether M. Thiers were provided with full
powers for carrying on the negotiations?

The Minister added, enjoying his victim's start and look of horrified
astonishment:

"My people in Paris tell me that there has been practically a
Revolution, and that a new Government is coming into power.  On the
Place before the Hôtel de Ville there were yesterday 15,000 persons
assembled, most of them National Guards from the Faubourgs, disarmed
and crying: '_Vive la Commune! ... Point d'Armistice!_'"

He went on, unheeding the writhing of the sufferer, whose dignity had
been so cruelly wounded:

"It appears that the Mayors of Paris had been summoned by Arago, and
were in one room conferring, while in the other was the Government.
Mobiles guarded the doors, but were thrust back by the insurgents.
General Trochu came out and confronted them.  He could only mouth and
gesticulate in a sort of dumb Crambo.  Cries of '_A bas Trochu!_'
drowned his voice.  There was a rush....  One does not know how, but
Trochu finally escaped out of their clutches--got out by a back door
and cut his lucky to the Louvre....  Here is one of the slips of
paper that were thrown from the windows of the Hôtel....  They have
'_Commune décretée.  Dorian Président!_' upon them.  There was a
scene of confusion peculiar to your nation, in the midst of which M.
Félix Pyat and other virtuous citizens proclaimed the Commune, and
constituted themselves into a Government embracing Blanqui,
Ledru-Rollin, Délescluze, Louis Blanc, and Flourens....  Flourens got
upon a table--made himself heard, it seems, finally calling upon the
Members of the Government of National Defense to resign.  M. Jules
Favre refused ... was arrested with the old Government--the new
Government reigned until two o'clock in the morning, when some
battalions of Mobiles--the 106th and 90th, under Picard--closed in
upon the Hôtel and ejected them.  Trochu was there with his staff....
Since, a general sort of agreement appears to have been arrived at.
A decree signed by Favre was placarded yesterday, announcing that on
Thursday next a vote is to be taken whether there is to be a Commune
or not....  What I relate happened the day before yesterday.  Now, if
Your Excellency saw M. Jules Favre at Sèvres yesterday afternoon, he
must have told you of the turn things were taking.  Oblige me with a
plain answer to a plain question....  Did he tell you, or did he not?"

The humiliated gentleman bowed his head assentingly.  The hot sweat
of a mortal agony stood upon his broad forehead, and flushed and
working features.  His glasses were dimmed with the reek of his
torment and his shame.  The Enemy knew all.  There was no concealing
anything from one so well served by spies and informers.  Probably
the cruel interview with his fellow-Minister had been listened to,
from its beginning to its end.

Thiers and Favre had sat on two iron chairs at a gayly painted little
iron table, before one of the wrecked _cafés_ that boasted the sign
of _La Belle Bouquetière_.  No one had been near except a haggard,
absinthe-sodden wretch, who lay in a drunken stupor upon the
pavement, close under the broken window of the deserted restaurant.
Perhaps that drunken man had been his spy....  What was he saying in
the harsh, bullying tones that grated so?...

"The mob who rode roughshod over General Trochu, and his Council of
lawyers and orators, appear to be actuated by the desire of fighting
things out with us.  They burn for a chance, it appears, to pit their
undisciplined courage against the Army of United Germany.  They are
hardly to be blamed for accepting literally the theatrical bombast
with which they have been fed by Favre!"

He laughed, and said, with a galling imitation of the rhetorical
manner of the Democratic barrister of Lyons:

"'Not a stone of our fortresses'--do you remember?  'Not an inch of
our territory!'--have you forgotten?...  When it was in the power of
the person to whom he boasted to have said to him: _Every inch.
Every stone!_..."

He rose up, towering over the unhappy personage who sat opposite to
him, in a little wicker easy-chair that would have suited a child.
His greedy vitality physically sucked energy from his victim.  The
stare of his great eyes oppressed, the roughness of his speech had a
wounding brutality.

"Which Party governs France?  The Blue Republicans or the Reds,
answer me?  Can one treat with a State that has no responsible heads?"

"Monsieur le Comte!" screamed the personage thus cruelly prodded.
"Do you not know that you are insulting me?"

He had grown deadly pale, and now flushed red, making a passionate
gesture as though to strike himself on the forehead, as the other
asked him with bitter irony:

"Is the truth so offensive to you as all that?...  If you did not
wish to hear it, you have come to the wrong shop.  The day for
compliments and flatteries has passed with the tinsel Empire of your
Napoleon, unless you compel us to bring him back and set him up again
at the Tuileries.  Believe me, he has contemplated this
eventuality!--has his carpet-bags ready packed, and his eagle in a
traveling-cage....  And certainly we could discuss the military
questions at issue better with him than with you civilian gentlemen,
who do not understand the language of War."

It was not possible to get a word in edgeways....  The rasping voice
tore the nerve-fibers as with a saw-edge, the towering figure
overwhelmed, the powerful stare fascinated and terrified as the
pitiless gaze of the snake when fixed upon a frog or a bird.

And Bismarck went on, deliberately lashing himself into a passion:

"Are you and your colleagues aware that I suffer in my reputation for
these procrastinations?  It is said at home in Germany that I am
over-lenient toward the French, our treacherous enemies ... that I
delay to reap for United Germany the glory and profit for which she
has paid so terrible a price in blood.  Yourself with MM. Ducrot and
Favre have considered my terms for an armistice inadmissible....  In
return I tell you you have forfeited the right to criticize any terms
that I may propose....  You would hold the elections--even in those
provinces of France which we hold as conquerors!  You would
reprovision Paris and her fortresses!  We should be hellish
unpractical if we listened to you!...  What the big devil!...  Are we
to permit the levies, and the recruiting by which the French Republic
may hurl against us a new army to shoot down?
_Himmelkreuzbombenelement!_...  Do you take us for sheep's heads?"

The unhappy Minister protested in a faint voice:

"Monsieur le Comte, I do not even comprehend the meaning of the term!"

"Ah, by God!" thundered the terrible voice, "you are ignorant indeed
of German words and German meanings, and the word that you understand
least of all when applied to yourselves is WAR!  Silk gloves are not
our wear in War, and therefore the iron gloves with which we have
handled you have pinched your soft flesh and made you squeal.  We
might complain of your _Francs-tireurs_, who hide in woods and
houses, and shoot our soldiers unawares; and of the inhumanity of
your mitrailleuses which cut red lanes through whole regiments.  But
no!  You are the sufferers--you are to be pitied--even for the
injuries you wreak upon yourselves...."

He struck with his clenched fist the top of the chiffonier near which
he stood, and the dull shock of the contact of that sledge-hammer of
muscle and bone with the solid marble, made the pictures shake upon
the wall, the windows rattle in their frames, and the bewildered
listener leap as if he had been shot.

"I rode over to St. Cloud yesterday," he went on, "to look at the
palace you have set on fire with your shells from Mont Valérien.  It
is burning still, as I don't doubt you know.  A well-dressed French
gentleman stood looking at the smoldering ashes of the conflagration.
Near him was a French workman in a dirty blue blouse--'_C'est
l'œuvre de Bismarck!_' said the gentleman to the plebeian, little
dreaming who was near....  But the cad in the blouse only said to
him: 'Why, our ---- gunners did that themselves!'  That workman had
more sense in his pumpkin than the whole lot of you!"

M. Thiers revived under the fresh insult sufficiently to plant a
sting:

"It is said, Monsieur, and on excellent authority, that the Imperial
Palace was sacked by German troops before it was set on fire."

The Chancellor lowered his heavy brows and demanded almost menacingly:

"Do you assert that His Majesty the King or the Crown Prince of
Prussia were parties to a crime of this kind?"

"No, Monsieur, not for an instant!"

The Chancellor said with a short laugh that had no mirth in it:

"That is fortunate, otherwise I should have been compelled to break
off, and finally, our negotiations with regard to this question of an
Armistice, and deal only with the question of the territory to be
added--in addition to the fortresses on the right bank of the
Rhine--and those six thousand millions of francs that we shall
certainly take from you!"

The thrust caused M. Thiers to leap to his feet, galvanized into a
feverish energy.  He screamed, raising his clenched hands and
sweeping them downward and outward:

"It cannot be, Monsieur!--it is outrage--robbery--ruin!  Europe will
intervene if you persist in such a demand!"

"Ha, ha, ha!"  The great jovial giant's laugh set the crystal drops
upon the mantelshelf-vases and the wall-mirror girandoles tinkling,
and reached the hearing of Hatzfeldt and von Keudell in the
drawing-room, and the decipherers in the Bureau below.  It vibrated
through the joists and planks and spaces above the plastered ceiling,
and made Madame Charles start where she lay upon the floor of her
bedroom listening, with her ear pressed to the uncarpeted boards.

"My good sir, you are making game of me....  You have visited the
Courts of the Powers--we know to what profit....  You have solicited
intervention--to be told what both of us knew very well before! ...
The British Lion may lash and roar, but will not do more, that is
certain.  England has not sufficiently recovered from the war of the
Crimea--from the further drain of men and gold caused by the Indian
Mutiny....  Austria, in spite of creeds and bias--with her
German-speaking population and her Germanized institutions--may be
regarded as a powerful German State.  Italy lies under the heel of
Austria.  If the Russian Bear elect to hug, the hugging will be done
upon our side.  For it is inconceivable that Germany should ever be
at war with Russia.  Our interests are and have always been one...."
He laughed again, and said, laughing:

"And, knowing this, you threaten me with the intervention of European
Powers....  You will hear nothing with respect to forfeiture of
territory!...  You refuse to contemplate the question of the Gold
Indemnity!...  Wait!" he said--"wait until the bombardment is a month
old and the bread-basket is empty....  Then we shall hear you sing to
a different tune!"

"Monsieur le Comte!..."

The old man tottered to his feet.  He was ashen in hue, and
trembling.  His blue lips hung breathlessly apart, his eyes had a
lack-luster stare behind their gold-rimmed glasses; he pressed a hand
over his left breast as though to repress a pang of pain.

"M. le Comte ... I have suffered too much....  I find myself unable
to continue our interview....  With your permission ...
to-morrow?..."  He bowed and took his hat and cane, and repeated
weakly: "To-morrow?"

"With pleasure!" said the Man of Iron, escorting him to the door.

And the old, humiliated, fallen King-maker, the great literary
genius, the polished orator--tottered away out of the presence of the
conqueror.

He was to return upon the morrow, and for many days thenceafter, to
be played with and tortured, to be tantalized and mocked.

He was to return flushed with futile hope, only to be crushed and
retire discomfited.  He was to furnish an inexhaustible source of
amusement for the delectation of his implacable enemy.

He was to return after a prolonged absence within the walls of the
beleaguered capital, he and others, faint with famine, broken by
anxiety, shattered by suspense and sleeplessness, forced by sheer
hunger to sit and partake at the groaning board of their merciless
foe, compelled by his arrogance to listen to his jestings, moistening
the food they placed between their livid lips, with the stinging salt
of tears.




LXIX

The center of a small but lively group, composed of admirers and
listeners, Prussian officers known in Berlin, their Bavarian and
Hessian friends and acquaintances, American and English Press
Correspondents, and a traveling Oriental or two--you might have
observed Madame de Straz--a full-blown Comtesse now, in virtue of the
patent of nobility asserted by her husband--in the restaurant of the
Hôtel des Réservoirs--not always accompanied by her Assyrian-featured
lord.

Adelaide had not grown younger since the adventure of the Silk Scarf.
Her bold and striking beauty had suffered gravely, though her figure,
set off by its fashionable and well-chosen dress, was as supple and
graceful as of yore.  She looked like some gorgeous fruit that the
wasps had ravaged, and to conceal this she made up heavily and wore
thicker veils.  What she now lacked in loveliness she endeavored to
make up in _espièglerie_ and easy-going good-fellowship.  Not a few
officers responded with enthusiasm to her pressing invitations to
breakfast or lunch at the little country villa she and M. de Straz
had rented, at Maisons Lafitte beyond St. Germain.

One need hardly say that there was play on these occasions, besides
excellently prepared dishes and a liberal flow of the champagne,
besides the cognac and liqueurs of which Madame drank a good deal.

To quiet her nerves, raveled by the unhappy situation of her beloved
country, she declared, for it suited her to be a Frenchwoman now.

She would have dearly liked to inveigle a Duke, Grand or Hereditary,
or even a Prince Regnant, to her roof-tree and her baccarat-board,
but these personages, bestarred and beribboned, furred, jack-booted,
buck-skinned and long-spurred, were as shy as the hares and
partridges in the forest, that were incessantly cracked at by hungry
pot-hunters.  Wherefore the sumptuous Adelaide must perforce be
contented with Counts and Barons, whose purses were less lengthy than
their pedigrees, as a rule.

"A solitary nest and too remote, it may be....  But for a bride and
bridegroom, solitude and remoteness have their advantages!" had
proclaimed M. de Straz, with a shrug of infinite meaning, and
suggestive glances of his black Oriental eyes.  Certainly the guests
of Madame and Monsieur, even when conveyed to the destination in
hired broughams and victorias, were wont to find the road, running
through abandoned villages and by deserted châteaux, unexpectedly
barricaded with felled timber and scarred with unfinished trenches,
more than a trifle long.

The nest of these love-birds, half a mile from the sacked railway
station and the broken bridge of Maisons Lafitte, was enclosed in
private grounds.  The villa Laon--how or from whom acquired, nobody
ever thought of questioning--was a cottage with Swiss gables and East
Indian verandas standing in gardens adorned with glass arcades and
Italian pergolas, their vines and roses stripped and shuddering in
the bitter wintry winds.  There were also Chinese bridges crossing
pieces of ornamental water, aviaries of finches and canaries, and
wired enclosures once well stocked with silver pheasants, now, thanks
to the nocturnal ravages of mysterious marauders, depopulated in a
manner painful to behold.

"You pretend," said Valverden teasingly to Adelaide, "that the
neighbors creep out at night and annex the pheasants, or that our
cavalry pickets take them for the mess-pot, or that they are stolen
by _Francs-tireurs_.  _Francs-tireurs_ there are in plenty in the
neighborhood--every hour some honest German soldier gets his death at
the hands of one of these scoundrels!--but as far as concerns the
vanished inmates of the pens and cages, I believe you and M. de Straz
have eaten them yourselves."

He stretched his long spurred legs out over the brocade of an Empire
sofa gracing Madame's boudoir, and leaning back his handsome head,
looked up at her teasingly.

"With my assistance, for that _salmis_ we had for breakfast was of
home production I am certain.  Come, own that I have guessed as well
as Mariette can cook at a pinch."

Adelaide frowned and bit her lip.  But she let her gaze dwell
lingeringly on the upturned face of the handsome Guardsman, and said,
seeming to search for her own sulky, splendid image in the blue eyes
with which Adonis made play:

"If you were less like Max I believe I should detest you!..."  She
added, after an instant: "And if you resembled him more than you do,
you would find no welcome here."

"Beyond _salmis_ of pet pheasants, and stewed carp out of your
landlord's fish-ponds."  His red lips rolled back in a grin that
showed the strong white teeth, the fuzzy ends of his fair mustache
sparkled as though the hair had been sprinkled with gold-dust.  "Who
is your landlord?  I am dying to know.  Do you rent the place of the
gardener, or that pompous-looking butler who has not got the key of
the cellars, but nevertheless can produce champagne of Comet brand
and excellent Roussillon.  Or is it a speculative partnership?  Some
of us have dropped a good deal of money here in play lately....  They
are beginning to grumble noisily--particularly that little
black-haired _aide-de-camp_ of the Duke of Coburg, and von Kissling
of the squadron of Blue Dragoons quartered here at Maisons
Lafitte....  What's in the wind I don't pretend to know, but they
might get you turned out of here--they might even obtain an order
from Headquarters for the return of their lost cash!..."

"Bernhard!"  Her ringed white hands tenderly caressed his forehead.
"You will protect me from them!--you will stand my friend!  Oh! how
horrible it is to want money--always money!"

Valverden said, neatly biting off the end of a cigar and spitting the
nipped-off end through the open glass-doors leading out upon the
veranda:

"Has not M. de Straz got any money?  And did not my Cousin Max give
you enough?...  You used to seem uncommonly flush of the ready when
one saw you queening it among the gay _cocottes_ of Berlin."

His tone cut like a whip.  But Adelaide was growing used to take
insults with outward meekness.  She swallowed her wrath and even
tried to smile.

It was horribly true that she had need of money.  Even before she had
fallen into her present state of servitude, she had known that a day
was coming when she would be penniless.

Like all other women of her sensuous tastes and clamorous
predilections, Adelaide devoured money as a pussycat crunches up
small birds.  Her dead lover had spent upon her lavishly, had
provided that an income should be paid her out of his private estate.
But it was not sufficient for a woman so extravagant, and Adelaide
had supplemented it in various ways.  Firstly, by obtaining
information for the Prussian Secret Intelligence Bureau.  Secondly,
by tapping the bank-balances of admirers of the wealthier order.
Thirdly, by signing Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes for cash
at ruinous rates of interest.  When she had conceived the idea of
obtaining a reconciliation with Henri de Bayard, the prospect of
incarceration in a debtor's prison had loomed very near.

The cunning fable of her riches that had been devised to tempt him to
his ruin, had failed through the very whiteness of the man's
integrity.  Ah, Adelaide!  The way to have triumphed over the Colonel
would have been to have crept in tatters as a beggar to his door.

But she had never understood the man.  Let us hope that generous soul
of his was spared knowledge of the degradation of the woman he had
worshiped, as Valverden went on, barely deigning to hide his contempt
of her, or to modify even slightly the insolence of his tone:

"You have asked me to protect you.  I have no objection to doing so.
My sympathy is not at all with the losers who squeal.  Even when I
was as poor as a church-mouse I had the gift of being plucked without
wincing.  Besides, I won money that night when Von Kissling dropped
such a lot....  And of course my testimony would be
worth--something...."

His tone of bargaining was unmistakable.  Adelaide flushed a
dusky-red, through which the fading streaks of Straz's love-gift
showed plainly, and her dark eyes gleamed covetously as she bent over
the young man.  She whispered with her hot lips almost touching the
diagonal white band of forehead above his soldierly sunburn:

"What, Bernhard?  Tell me what it would be worth to you...."

His long blue eyes laughed up into hers, lazily.  He said, feeling
for the silver case in which he carried his fusees:

"Shall we say ... a little information regarding the whereabouts of
Mademoiselle Titania....  M. de Straz has piqued my curiosity, you
will observe."

"So!..."

She reared above him like a furious Hamadryad, whispering thickly,
for rage dried up her tongue:

"So it is of my daughter you and Nicolas have been talking apart
together, both here and at the Hôtel des Réservoirs.  Are you both
mad?  For a pale, plain, dull school-girl ... a peaky, undeveloped,
mincing doll!"

He raised himself to a sitting posture, and answered her coarsely:

"Women like you cannot realize what is or is not pleasing to men of
my standard.  The Prince Imperial must have seen a good many pretty
women, young as he is, yet he found your daughter charming, I am
told....  M. de Straz, who is a judge, admires her excessively....
If my curiosity is tickled, the fault is your own, for it was you and
not M. Straz who first engaged my interest in that quarter....  Did I
not speak to Count Moltke at your request of Mademoiselle?  Well, he
did--though at first he scouted the notion--sound Count Bismarck on
the subject, when he called to congratulate him on his First Class of
the Iron Cross, and be complimented on his own Order _Pour Le
Mérite_."

He folded his arms on his broad chest and dropped the words out
lingeringly, relishingly, his blue eyes gloating over the changes in
her tortured face:

"And the Chancellor answered him: '_Do not you trouble yourself!  All
is well with the pretty young daughter of de Bayard, by that
disreputable old woman who played the mistress of Count Max in '67._'"

She screamed, and struck with her clenched hand at the fair, flushed,
grinning face as though she would willingly have battered out its
beauty.  He caught her wrist with a fencer's quickness, and prisoned
the other in the twinkling of an eye.  He went on, holding her
immovable, leisurely enjoying the changes upon her tortured face:

"As a good German I do not interfere with my superiors.  His
Excellency knows where the girl is, and does not at present choose to
tell.  But you, Werte Frau, have the right to question His
Excellency, whose answer was repeated to me by my Chief, Count
Moltke.  Do not forget, however, that you lay claim to the disrepute
as well as the daughter when you present yourself at the Foreign
Office ... in the Rue de Provence...."

She panted breathlessly:

"I shall not go!  No one shall compel me!"

"Oh, in that case," said Valverden, rising and releasing her, "I can
only leave you to the arguments of M. de Straz.  He is coming now--I
can hear his voice in the garden.  _Auf Wiedersehen!_"  He said over
his shoulder, as he lounged out of the cottage: "In the affair of Von
Kissling, do not count on my assistance.  It is only given on
condition you fall in with our views."

So he and Straz were in league....  Rage stung her to the mad
imprudence of rebellion--the proud sultana whom a thousand freakish
cruelties on the part of her swarthy master had taught to be a
trembling slave.

The Roumanian, we know, was nothing if not subtle.  When Adelaide
flatly refused to call at the Foreign Office in the Rue de Provence
in the character of a bereaved and yearning mother, he smiled on her,
almost tenderly.  He kissed the wrists Valverden's grip had bruised.

"Queen Rose of my Garden of Delights," he said, "why did you let the
girl go in the beginning?  You recognized her value even when you did
not know that she has money in her own right."

Money....  A new light began to break upon Adelaide.  The fear of a
sudden and violent death no longer stiffened her muscles.  She
moistened her lips, pale under their rose-tinged salve, and lifted
her eyebrows inquiringly.

"Money, soul of my soul," said Straz, who had almost reverted to the
original gushing and poetic Nicolas of Adelaide's remembrance, the
lover whom in pre-Sigmaringen days she had cajoled and despised and
betrayed.  "Not a large fortune certainly, but between her
grandmother's estate and her father's savings she has a sum of 80,000
francs invested in the Belgian cloth manufactory and dyeing works of
M. Charles Tessier.  Not a fortune, but not a sum to be at all
despised."  He added: "I have obtained this information from a
person--formerly a clerk in the employment of the Versailles firm of
solicitors who enjoyed the confidence of M. le Colonel and his
sainted mother."  The quirk of his lips and the roll of his eyes as
he made this reference, so unsavory in the ears of Adelaide, cannot
be described.  "From this retentive person--I refer to the
ex-clerk--I have purchased the intelligence I now divide with her who
has the right to share the secrets of my heart."

Adelaide had previously seated herself, at a motion of his finger.
She looked up now as he thrust a hand between his vest and
shirt-bosom.  Their glances met.  He said to her with a snap of his
thick white fingers:

"No!  Put that out of your head, _ma cocotte_!  Not a sou of de
Bayard's will ever come his widow's way."

This uncanny faculty of the Roumanian for reading her unspoken
thoughts was one of the secrets of his power over Adelaide.  She
shuddered now, encountering his look.

"Don't you know," he was demanding, "that with her unique beauty
Mademoiselle would be a fortune in our pockets even were she
penniless?  What! you doubt the justice of my taste--which placed on
you the seal of approval when your own charms were at their
perihelion.  You who have paid the price for those supreme moments
when celestial flames enveloped you--when you knew yourself nearest
to the bosom of the Sun."

Were all the men in league with this man to taunt and mock and
torture her?  A fierce surge of blood rushed to her brain.  She heard
his thick chuckle as she loosened, with shaking hands, the lace about
her throat.

"Why do you not kill me outright?" she cried to him, as the tide
rushed back to her heart, and left her livid.  "Are you not yet weary
of playing this hideous farce of marriage?  Why murder me by
inches?...  Will you never set me free?..."

He said, combing his clubbed beard with his thick yellow-white
finger-tips:

"When you have helped to get back Mademoiselle, I will think about
providing you an honorable retirement.  Come!  Be pliant....  You
have my word that you shall be free.  But without funds," he
shrugged, "who can do anything?  And Mademoiselle has these
expectations ... and beyond these I have certain definite
arrangements with--a certain personage--who is--content to pay
handsomely for an introduction to her."

She cast caution to the four winds and shrieked at him furiously:

"'De Bayard's daughter by that disreputable old woman!...'  Ah, for
that he shall indeed pay handsomely!"

For though the sentence quoted by Valverden bore the unmistakable
stamp of the Iron Chancellor's mintage, the tone in which the words
had been repeated, the icy glance of contempt that had accompanied
them, rankled in the flesh of the unhappy woman, like barbed thorns.

The venom wrought in her still, even to hardihood and a courage
bordering on effrontery, when a few days later her hired carriage
drew up before the sentried gate of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de
Provence, early in the forenoon of a December day.




LXX

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, 'and _au 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 Tessier _porte 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 weird
_patois_ that 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 the _porte
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!"




LXXI

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 not _give 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 a
_laissez-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-French _patois_, 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 is _quatsch_!"  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 imaginary
_Franc-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, your
_beignets_ are 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 your _parole_ not 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 my _parole_ not to run away."

"So be it!" he said, and slightly acknowledging her deep curtsey,
motioned to Von Keudell to open the door.




LXXII

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 the
_parole_."  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 under
_surveillance_.  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, consequently _ragoût de lièvre_ has
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 a _coupé_ belonging 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!"




LXXIII

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:

"No more!--there must be no more!...  Pray cease, my friend!"

She had withdrawn her hands....  He said with a catch in his breath
and with eyes that implored her:

"I do not offend you?..."

She looked at him full and drew off one glove and laid the bare hand
in his extended palm.  Warm and soft, it seemed incredibly small as
it lay there.  The touch of it infused a melting sweetness; a thrill
went through the man from head to foot.  Perhaps the thrill was
communicated, for she drew her hand away quickly.  She said:

"You are very generous to one who has so often deceived you....  How
many times I have condemned myself for my wickedness, thinking: 'Of
all those noble deeds I have described in the letters, not one has
been really performed by M. Charles Tessier....  All are invented to
make a good face!'"

He said in a whisper:

"I could forgive you for making even a worse fool of me--now I know
you never were married!  It was your telling me that knocked me out
of time....  Nothing else mattered much afterward....  You said to
Monseigneur yesterday that it was to retain your place in this house
you pretended to be the wife of its master.  But why did you pretend
it in the first place to _me_?"

She began to change color from pale to red, and tried to free her
hand.  It was impossible.  He said:

"I mean to know....  I have the right to know!..."

She faltered:

"See you well, Monsieur, I cannot explain...."

He said doggedly:

"Then I shall explain it for you.  You told me that to make me
jealous!  Now, did you not?"

She winced.

"Monsieur ... not then!...  Upon my faith, I assure you....  See you
well, I had promised my father that M. Charles should be my
husband....  I would have kept that promise _à tout hasard_ ... had
M. Charles not married Mademoiselle Basselôt.  And so I told you I
was married, not then to make you jealous ... that came after.  But
to make it ... possible to be true!"

He almost reeled under the sudden shock of the terrible, exquisite
confession.  He would have given a year of life to let himself go
with the sweet roaring current that tumbled foaming through his veins
and sent its red sparkling bubbles to his brain.  But there were
steps and voices on the other side of the high laurel hedge that
divided the kitchen garden from the pleasance.  He recognized
Bismarck-Böhlen's snigger and Hatzfeldt's lazy, well-bred
accents--telling an anecdote of the Minister one could not doubt.
The languid voice reached their ears distinctly.  It said:

"He was an officer of French Imperial Hussars, who had been taken
prisoner at Sedan, and had broken his _parole_.  He had been taken
again in arms against us, fighting under General Chancy at Le Mans.
So she comes post-haste to Versailles, lays siege to the King, who
will not see her--to the Crown Prince, who will not see her--and
finally to Moltke, who will not see her, because all three of them
are cowards at the sight of a woman's tears.  Finally the Chief
consents to receive her....  It was yesterday, in his room at the
Prefecture.  She comes in--all in black, which to a blonde of her
type is very suitable, full of hope at not being made to _croquer le
marmot_ for long.  She reels off a long tale about her Frederic, his
bravery, and his excellent heart.  The Chief listens sympathetically,
looking at the clock from time to time.  Again the heart is pressed
upon his notice.  It is heavy with grief at the thought of a life
parting from Madame, who is Frederic's mistress, by the way--and not
his wife!...  It is weighed down with suspense at the delay of the
Prussian _Kriegsrath_ in answering the loved ones his prayer....  She
gets so far, when the Chief looks up at the clock, and says, touching
his table bell: 'Madame, that excellent heart of your client is even
heavier than it was five minutes ago....'  'How, Monseigneur?' cries
Madame.  'He was shot,' says the Chief, 'just now when I looked up at
the clock.  And, as a rule, seven out of the ten bullets shot off by
the firing party are found to have lodged in the region of the
heart.'  So the poor woman screamed and fainted.  They carried her
past me with her teeth set and all her fine hair hanging down...."

Bismarck-Böhlen's snigger greeted the _dénouement_.  The footsteps
grew fainter.  Juliette and Breagh exchanged glances.  She said with
white lips:

"Monseigneur can be merciless!  And yet, when I heard him tell my
mother that did he know of my hiding place, he would not betray it, I
said to myself: '_How you have misjudged this man!_'"

Her comrade had started at the reference to Madame de Bayard,
remembering the rendezvous to be kept that night.  Juliette went on,
with a liquid look:

"Monsieur, I have a favor to ask of you....  All those weeks when I
struggled with that purpose from which you tried so faithfully to
dissuade me, I did not once dare to set foot in Our Lord's House.
But when I threw away that wicked bottle, I found that I could pray
once more....  I went to the Carmelite Fathers and made my
confession....  I received Our Lord in the Holy Communion ... and my
soul began to be at peace again.  Now it is Christmas Eve and I
should much like to attend the Midnight High Mass, or the Second Mass
at daybreak, and I had intended to ask you to take me, but I am upon
_parole_....  Therefore, I entreat of you--pray for me when you make
your own Communion.  How much I need Divine pardon and guidance ...
even you can hardly know...."

His conscience stung.  He had not intended to evade the sacred
obligation, yet he had wavered as to when he should comply with the
command of the Church.  He said:

"It shall be as you ask.  I shall attend High Mass at the Church of
the Carmelites at midnight.  Afterward, I have an appointment--at a
place some distance from here."

"So late, Monsieur?"

Her glance had not only surprise in it, but fear for him.  He said
lightly:

"Very late....  I may not get back until--some time near the second
breakfast....  Madame Potier will have some hot coffee ready for
me...."

She flushed and knitted her small hands together anxiously.  She
asked:

"Could you not--could you not take me into your confidence?"

He said bluntly:

"Not without myself committing a breach of confidence...."  He added,
holding out his strong hand: "Try to trust me.  If it were possible
to tell you, I would do it, you must know."

"I know it, and I trust you, Monsieur, always...."

There was faith in her eyes.  He kissed her hands and released them,
and turned with her silently....  They walked back together as far as
the house.




LXXIV

At six o'clock, when the snow had ceased falling and the old moon of
December glowed redly through a thinning veil of frost fog, the Crown
Prince arrived to dine with the Minister.

The Heir Apparent of Prussia came with an escort of Dragoons of the
Bodyguard, driving with one of his aides-de-camp in a closed sledge
belonging to the exiled Empress, an exquisite vehicle, finished like
an enameled _bonbonnière_, supplied with a great white Polar
bearskin, and drawn by two superb black Orloffs, whose glossy coats
had the burnish of old Italian armor in the ruddy light of torches
held by orderlies and grooms.

The Minister, followed by Hatzfeldt and his Chief Privy Councilor,
went down bareheaded, between a double row of Chancery attendants,
dressed in their new dark-blue liveries, with black velvet facings,
to welcome his Crown Prince.  The broad breast of "Unser Fritz"
displayed the Order _Pour la Mérite_, with the First-Class of the
Iron Cross, and the Red Eagle, with an English Order, bestowed by
Queen Victoria upon her son-in-law.  He sported new shoulder straps,
distinctive of his newly conferred rank as Field Marshal, and cut a
very gallant figure, as may be supposed.

Perhaps you can see him at the head of the long table in the
dining-room of the Tessier mansion, his Chancellor and host upon his
left hand.  Upon his right sat the Bavarian plenipotentiary, Count
Maltzahn.  Count Holnstein, another Bavarian Minister, newly arrived
from Munich with a letter from his King, and the Bavarian Minister of
War, Von Pranky, were severally disposed according to their degrees.
Prince Putbus was there, and a certain Herr von Zadowski, a large
red-faced man in a green Hussar uniform, wearing a white patch with a
red Cross, the badge of the Knights of St. John, and the Iron Cross,
was also present, and the Secretaries and Privy Councilors filled the
lower end of the board; sporting the new Foreign Office uniform of
dark blue, with black velvet side stripes to the trousers, and a
black-velvet-collared, double-buttoned military frock.  Sword belts
and black-hilted swords with gold knots caused the more stout and
elderly among the Councilors infinite discomfort, to the secret but
acute delight of Bismarck-Böhlen and Count Hatzfeldt.  The dinner,
composed of love gifts from admiring German patriots to their
Chancellor, was of a quality, quantity, lusciousness, and length
calculated, as Privy Councilor Bucher piously whispered to a
neighbor, "to make a guest imagine himself a banqueter in Abraham's
bosom before the time."

Long before his table companions had reached the zenith of their
sensuous enjoyment, the Crown Prince had finished his temperate meal.
The Chancellor commented mentally, glancing at the clear, rather set
features of the great golden-bearded figure seated beside him:

"Fritz is endeavoring to impress myself and these Bavarians, with
whom it rests to decide whether he is Emperor or no Emperor, _par la
fermeté de son attitude_ with regard to the pleasures of the table,
and by the Spartan simplicity of his habits and tastes.  How I should
like to offer him black broth and barley bread in a special wooden
bowl and platter.  But that, I suppose, would be _lèse majesté_."

And closely emulated by Von Holnstein and Von Pranky, he gave free
reign to his Gargantuan appetite, taking twice of nearly every
course, and washing the huge meal down, as was his habit, with floods
from Rheims and Épernay.

When the cloth was drawn and fresh relays of wine appeared, the
Prince accepted but a single glass of _fine champagne_ with his
coffee.  When the costly cigars were offered, he pulled from his
pocket a porcelain pipe bearing his crest and monogram, painted and
sent him by his English wife as a Christmas present, and said:

"I should prefer to smoke this, if Your Excellency does not mind."

Dinner over, His Royal Highness, with the Bavarians and the Minister,
repaired to the salon.  Overhead, Mademoiselle de Bayard, lonely in
her prison bedroom on the second floor, heard their voices--deep,
sonorous bass, shrill tenor, and penetrating, resonant
baritone--engaged in discussion or joining in argument.  At ten
o'clock the Prince took leave, attended to his vehicle as previously
by the Chancellor, to whom he said, in a low tone, as he pressed his
hand:

"We are now no longer North Germans, but Germans.  I shall urge upon
my father the speedy proclamation of the Empire with all external
state.  Names, arms, titles, colors place us before the world in a
proper light.  I have never coveted a Crown Imperial.  I denounce the
idea of a bombardment as brutal and unnecessary.  But I am willing to
reap all the honors and advantages that can be gained from our
victory.  Impress this upon my father, who treats pomp and solemnity
with indifference.  As to demanding the old crown of Charlemagne from
Vienna, I do not at all see the necessity for that.  I shall write to
my wife to-night!"

And _Unser Fritz_ got into the exquisite sledge that had been given
to the beautiful Empress by the Third Napoleon, and was whirled away
in a glittering dust of snow, kicked up by the fiery Orloffs' heels.
And the Chancellor, recovering from his deep, ceremonious bow,
wheeled and went back up the steps, with his bald head glittering in
the ruddy torchlight....  None might guess what savage triumph
swelled the heart beating under his white full-dress uniform, upon
this the night that set upon the fabric of the man's colossal labors
the copingstone of Success.

The Bavarian plenipotentiaries took leave within ten minutes.  Count
Hatzfeldt had been summoned to the salon a few moments previously.
When the unseen bustle of their departure had subsided, the
Secretaries and Councilors, smoking and drinking tea in the
dining-room, were unexpectedly joined by the Minister.

All rose up as he suddenly opened the folding doors, thrust in his
head and shoulders, and surveyed them, smiling.  Behind him was
Hatzfeldt, pale and excited, and with eyes that seemed dancing out of
his head.  There was a silence of expectation, then the great figure
moved to the table, and men scattered to make space for him as though
his contact might have slain.

He wore full-dress White Cuirassier uniform, without the steel
cuirass, and the First and Second Classes of the Iron Cross, and the
Red Eagle, with the peculiar deporation that he always sported, and
which had been given him in his young manhood for saving life.  His
bald forehead and great domed cranium were studded with shining drops
of perspiration, under his tufted brows his blue eyes blazed with a
triumph almost fearful; his straight-bridged, snub-ended nose, thick
cheeks, and bulldog jowl were crimson and dripping.  He drew out his
handkerchief and wiped them--and the hand that held the linen
palpably shook.

He said to them all, and they held their breath to listen:

"Gentlemen, the Bavarian business is settled, and everything signed
and sealed.  We have got our German Unity--and our German Empire!"

There was a deep silence for a moment, broken by Busch's request to
be allowed to take the pens with which the treaty had been signed.
He got permission.

"That little Busch," said the Minister, "will never lose anything for
want of a tongue.  If he thinks to find there the gold pen set with
brilliants, that was sent me by the Hamburg jeweler, he is mistaken.
Come!" he added, "this is a great occasion!" and bade Hatzfeldt ring
for a servant and order up more champagne.

The wine was brought and opened.  He said to the servant who
officiated:

"Let the house steward know that some wine is to be sent to the
clerks and decipherers in their room.  The servants also are to have
what they like best for drinking--I fancy Niederstedt will choose Old
Nordhausen.  But--short of my best liquor, let what each likes best
be given to him.  No!--not that glass.  I will drink out of my
biggest goblet!..."

With the fizzing bumper in hand, he waited until all had been served,
looking, as he reared his great bulk at the head of the full table,
the biggest man, mentally and physically, who had ever served the
Hohenzollern.  In his most powerful tones, he called the toast:

"_Hoch!_ to His Imperial Majesty, our Kaiser Wilhelm!"

Every man there strained his lungs to the utmost, but the great bull
voice of the Chancellor drowned every other there.

He talked a little more: "We should never have hooked the King of
Bavaria, but for the pluck of Holnstein, who set off from Munich to
tackle His Most Gracious at his Palace of Neuschwanstein, and--there
being no railway--made in six days a journey of eighteen German miles
on foot and on horseback over mountain passes, agreeably diversified
by forest tracks and timber roads."

He drank and went on:

"He arrived, to find His Majesty nursing his toothache in absolute
solitude, invisible to human eyes, save those belonging to the
dentist, his valets and fiddlers and grooms.  At first the King
refused to receive him, but Holnstein was clever enough to gain over
the dentist to deliver a letter from his own hand, and incidentally
one written by myself...."

He went on, with a smile that curved the great mustache into lines of
gayety:

"Knowing myself particularly detested by King Ludwig, I had taken
pains to make my letter acceptable.  I said in it that my family had
enjoyed the patronage of his family a trifle of five hundred years
ago.  I mentioned that reinstitution in the Wittelsbach good graces
had been the object of my whole life's labors.  I incidentally
pressed the claims of the King of Prussia to be made Emperor of
Germany.  I enclosed, with many apologies, the draft of a letter
which expressed the concurrence of Bavaria.  'Your Majesty has only
to copy this and sign it,' I added, 'and the troublesome business is
closed.'  What a prospect to a monarch afflicted by an obstinately
throbbing gumboil!  There was no paper or pen at hand with which to
answer, so the dentist presented his patient with a sheet out of his
pocketbook, and the patent ink reservoir pen with which he writes his
prescriptions.  King Ludwig sits up in bed, scrawls a copy of my
draft reply, and the German Empire is made....  The Festival of the
Orders and the Proclamation of the Emperor will come off in the Great
Hall of Versailles upon a certain date not far off....  I will leave
you to guess what the date is likely to be!..."

In the midst of a deafening tumult of joyful outcries and
congratulations, he turned his great eyes upon one excited face after
another, and drained his capacious glass and set it down.

"And with all this, gentlemen, our hopes might have foundered....
The Royal sign manual might have availed us nothing!... the Treaty
might never have been signed!...  Everything has depended upon a
question as trivial and ridiculous as indeed are most of our human
vanities.  Imagine the gravity of the question at issue!...  Whether
the Bavarian officers are in future to wear the marks of their
military rank upon their collars as heretofore, or on their
shoulders, like us North Germans?...  Upon that the German Empire has
dangled, do you hear?  Ah! how many times," he said, "I have been
tempted to break out and tell those fellows in the devil's name to
sew their stars and badges on the seats of their breeches.  But I
comforted myself with the old adage: _Politeness as far as the last
step of the gallows, but hanging for all that!_"

They roared with laughter.  He called:

"Fresh bottles!  A little excess may be pardoned, upon this of all
the nights in the year.  Really, I need a buck-up after all that I
have suffered, what with this Bavarian business, with Gortchakoff's
Note, and the bumptiousness of the English, who, without knowing why
or wherefore, are bellowing for war.  All that danger has been
avoided by the exercise of a little diplomacy....  But how can we
expect to be taken seriously by the Powers when we procrastinate in
the matter of the Paris Bombardment--which ought to begin at once!"

There was a hubbub of acquiescence, from which only the voices of
Hatzfeldt and Abeken were missing.

Bismarck-Böhlen begged leave to propose a toast.  The Minister asked,
tolerantly regarding his young relative, who vibrated with suppressed
hiccups, and was palpably unsteady upon his long legs:

"What is this toast we are to drink?"

Bismarck-Böhlen, in labor with speech, got out with a final effort:

"The--_hic!_--bombar--_hic!_--ment!  Big--_hic!_--potarroes for
Paris!"

"Ah, as God lives!" he said to them, "I must drink that toast!"

It went round.  Hatzfeldt followed with:

"Our glorious Chancellor!"

"Our glorious Chancellor!  Our great, ineffable, powerful
Kaiser-maker!  _Hoch!_ the Fürst von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Imperial
Germany's master-mind!"

Sobs mingled with their acclamations.  Their faces were now purple
red with the exception of Hatzfeldt's, which was ghastly, and
Bismarck-Böhlen's, which presented a combination of shades, in which
pea green and orange predominated, as, bathed in tears, he staggered
to embrace his august relative.  He was turned off with a single jerk
of the Minister's wrist, to fall weeping on the bosom of Privy
Councilor Abeken, who, shocked at finding himself involved in
something approaching to an orgie, was in the act of escaping from
the room.

"My thanks for the toast!" said the resonant voice in their dulled
and singing ears, "but pray all remember that I am no longer the
North German Chancellor, or even the Chancellor of the Germanic
Federation, but Chancellor of the German Empire, which has a better
sound!  And this is now, or will be by the New Year--the Imperial
German Chancellery, and Foreign Office, while you, my friends, are
Imperial Privy Councilors, Secretaries, and so on.  We will baptize
your green honors in a fresh round of champagne, and then I must
leave you.  I have yet before me some hours of hard work, and must
keep my head clear and cool."

He held his great glass to the now drunken servant to be filled up.

"_Prosit!_" he said, and lifted the capacious vessel high, and tossed
off the wine and dashed the costly goblet into the fireplace, where
it exploded in crystal fragments and sparkling dust.  Had they tried,
his satellites could not have followed his example.  Their leaden
arms could only lift the wine to their dribbly lips.  They drank--and
one by one each toper collapsed and buckled as though the solid oak
floor had given way under his boneless feet.  Hatzfeldt sank prone
across a chair.  Bismarck-Böhlen had rolled under the table some
moments previously, where, judging by the ominous nature of the
sounds that asserted his presence, Madame Tessier's Brussels carpet
was suffering for his excess.  Similar noises, stertorous snores were
reëchoed from other quarters as the Minister surveyed his fallen
warriors:

"Men cannot drink in these days!" he commented, and left the room.




LXXV

He threw on his cap and his great white cavalry cloak lined with
Russian sables and passed out by the front door into the still white
night.  The snowstorm was over, the fall had lessened to the merest
sprinkle.  The bitter northerly wind no longer drove the blizzards
screaming before it, each tree stood immovable under its burden, the
overloaded evergreen bushes lay flat upon the ground.  And the moon
sailed high, drifting away eastward.  Through the tatters of the
frost-fog shone the great blazing jewels of the stars.

Twelve o'clock struck near and far, and from the great Cathedral of
the Place St. Louis, as from every bell-graced tower and steeple in
Versailles, rang the Christmas carillon.  Many voices broke upon the
piercing, windless quiet.  Many footsteps were passing through the
snowy streets.  Catholics were going to their Midnight Mass and
Communion to be celebrated by permission of the Prussian Minister.
He pictured the crowds that would flock to the great churches of
Paris--how Notre Dame would be packed to the doors, and Ste.
Marguerite, also the great Church of the Carmelites, and the ancient
church of the Augustine Fathers in the Place des Victoires....

He imagined the flower-decked High Altars in the churches and chapels
of Versailles thronged about with war-weary, famine-bitten refugees
and residents.  German Catholics would mingle with them--the
conqueror and the conquered kneeling side by side.  Wounded soldiers
of both nations would help each other to limp to the Communion rail;
the atmosphere of the hushed, crowded sanctuaries would throb and
vibrate with prayer....

For what boon would all these suppliants entreat High Heaven most
fervently?  Pacing in and out of the snowy garden alleys, his giant
shadow passing over the moveless tree shadows, he asked himself the
question.  There was but one reply:

For Peace....  They would pray to GOD for Peace ... that Bismarck was
not going to give them yet a while.  Under the icicles that had
formed on his great mustache he laughed.  And a Satanic pride swelled
within him as he told himself that this was his crowning hour of life.

The wild sweet frenzy of the bells was dying down.  Distant refrains
of sturdy German carols came from the military quarters and the
barracks.  The bells stopped, wavered, broke out again, grew faint,
and were still.  And it seemed to the man standing in the chill
silence of the snowy garden as though he heard the Spirit of France
and the Spirit of Germany communing in the depths of this Christmas
Night.

It was the voice of France that wept:

"_Alas! miserable that I am, what hast thou done to me?  Why have thy
fierce hordes rolled down upon me from the strange Pagan lands in the
inclement East?  Was it my fame, or my wealth, or my beauty that
tempted thy Hunnish warriors, the yellow-haired footmen, with hard,
blue-eyed faces and huge hairy limbs, and the uncouth, fierce tanned
horsemen, who ride as though they were one with their beasts?  Woe is
met for my white breasts that were kissed by the conquering Roman!
must I yield them again to be bruised by the ravishing Frank?  A
curse on thee! thou treacherous, deep-flowing, swift river, that hast
again proved no barrier to the Prussian invader!  I am fallen a prey
to the Confederation set up by the Corsican upon the Rhine.  Oh! hard
as the nether millstone!  Wilt thou unpitying, behold Famine devour
my beauty?  See, the white limbs that show through my tattered
garment are fleshless!  No man who looks upon me would desire me
more!  For what hast thou dug a pit about me and set up thy terrible
war engines?  Was I not willing to make terms with thee, as the
conqueror?_"

It was the Voice of Germany that answered:

"_O Gaulish Queen! thou wert willing, but not for the conquered is it
to appoint the sum of the ransom, or hold parley with the victors
regarding the price of blood!  Hearest thou, O fallen one?  I
withdraw my triumphant legions when it pleases me.  This is a land
where the wine and the women are luscious.  When we have drunken deep
enough, we shall load ourselves with spoil and treasure and go.  Yet
ere I withdraw, I shall have known thee as a lover, whose desire is
kindled the fiercer because of thy hate.  Death shall be the priest
who celebrates our espousals.  He shall unite us with a ring of steel
and fire.  Then I depart, leaving thee to the enemies of thine own
household, who shall wreak thee greater ruin than thy foes.  But a
child shall be born of thy long resistance and my fierce triumph and
our brief mingling, who shall be called Peace!  Hearest thou, O
France?_"

He listened, standing on the hard-frozen, white-powdered garden path
between the swept-up snow mounds.  There was no answer.  He returned,
stamping the snow from his clogged spurs, to the house.

The door stood open as he had left it.  The even tread of the
sentries came from the Rue de Provence.  He had heard the guard being
changed at the entrance gates and beyond the wall at the bottom of
the garden.  Those without were vigilant if those within were not.
He remembered, noting the absence of the usual Chancery attendant
from the hall bench, that he had given permission to the servants,
without distinction, to make merry upon this night.  He could hear no
clinking of glasses and bottles belowstairs.  Perhaps sleep had
overtaken them as it had the revelers in the dining-room.  He softly
opened the double doors of that apartment.  A stench combined of
stale tobacco, spilled wine, and alcoholic humanity offended his
nose, and he withdrew it.  But not before he had ascertained that
with the exception of Abeken, who had left early, and Count
Hatzfeldt, who must have been taken home--the Staff slept there.

He looked into the drawing-room.  The fire lay in gray ashes between
the fire dogs.  On the table lay the signed Treaty with Bavaria.  He
picked it up and rolled it, looking at the mantelshelf, where the
bat-winged bronze demon brooded over the ormolu clock.

The room, whose hearth was cold, whose windows, closely shuttered,
bolted and blinded, had the curtains drawn close over them, was
lighted by a yellow ray shining through the glass door opening into
the conservatory.  He crossed to this door and looked through.
Commendably sober, the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers who
were quartered here sat chatting in whispers and smoking by the
stove.  Between them on an upturned tub bottom stood a little,
twinkling, taper-lit Christmas tree.

"Von Uslar!  Bleichröder!..."

The Minister opened the glass door and looked in.  The officers
sprang to their feet and stood saluting him.  He smiled at the little
tree, and asked, nodding at the door at the end of the conservatory,
leading to a room where the library of the late M. Tessier had
peaceably moldered until the clerks and decipherers of the Prussian
Foreign Office had been assigned it for their quarters:

"Have those fellows yet gone to bed?"

And even as he queried he knew by the peculiar smile upon the faces
of Captain von Uslar and his subaltern, that the scene in the
dining-room was repeated here.  He said with a shrug:

"Oh, well!...  They had my permission to make a night of it.  One
would like to be sure, though, that there are no candles to upset!"

The junior officer moved to the library door and opened it, setting
free a puff of hot air laden with wine fumes, and a chorus of snores
ranging from piping alto to deep bass.  Nothing could be seen except
the vague outlines of prostrate bodies, revealed by a pale gleam of
moonlight that made its way down the chimney and shone upon the dead
ashes of the hearth.

"Shall I wake anybody?" queried the lieutenant's look.  The Minister
made a sign in the negative, bade a pleasant good night to the two
officers, and withdrew, shutting the glass door.  He quitted the
drawing-room, went into the hall, tried the fastenings of the hall
door, and crossed to the hatchway under the main staircase that led
to the kitchen quarters.  A gas jet was flaring in a draught at the
bottom of the staircase.  He went down, regulated the light as he
passed to a safer volume, and tried the handle of the door leading to
what had been a housekeeper's parlor, and was now used by the house
steward and the Chancery attendants as an upper servants' hall.  A
gasalier of flaring jets revealed five persons in here, wrapped in
the heavy sleep of drunkenness.  One, the house steward, snored,
recumbent on a sofa; Grams and Engelberg, those monuments of rigid
respectability, reposed with their heads and shoulders resting on the
table, appropriately decorated with empty bottles and upset glass
beakers, and in the center of which stood a great china bowl.

The Minister peeped into this vessel curiously.  Apples stuck with
cloves, and cinnamon sticks left high and dry at the bowl bottom
testified to the Yuletide correctness of the punch, brewed by the
skilled hand of the Foreign Office cook.  He, the artist responsible
for the dinner which had astonished the three Bavarian
plenipotentiaries, leaned back, slumbering profoundly in a
high-backed armchair.  A china pipe, gayly tasseled and painted,
drooped from one side of his relaxed mouth.  His feet rested upon the
sprawling back of the gigantic Niederstedt, who had gone to sleep
upon a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove.  His huge right hand
still grasped an empty bottle that had contained his favorite Old
Nordhausen.  He opened one eye as the Minister stooped to inspect
him--uttered a stertorous snort, and relapsed again into his hoggish
Nirvana, leaving the Minister, as he deliberately turned out the gas
and quitted the steward's room, to realize that, save himself, the
two officers smoking in the winter garden, and the women presumably
sleeping on the second floor, the house whose outer precincts were so
vigilantly guarded, did not contain a sober head.

"Well, well!  A bout of drunkenness may well be condoned in the
servants when the master himself gave the signal for revelry!"

He told himself so, smiling as he made the round of the basement
house doors.  Nothing had disturbed his equanimity saving the
discovery that Niederstedt was incapable of speech or movement.  For
with his strange characteristic mingling of audacity and caution, the
Minister, while leaving Mademoiselle de Bayard practically free
within the house limits, had insured by private orders that the giant
East Prussian should sleep henceforth outside his master's bedroom
door.

Again, as the master's long strides carried him upstairs to the hall
again, and he took his bedroom candle from the row on the Empire
console, he knew a moment of inward f rat.  There was nobody to help
him undress, and put away his clothes.  Wherever Fate and the
Intendant General had assigned the Minister's sleeping quarters, the
deft Grans, or the attentive Engelberg had always appeared--or,
failing these, the stolid Niederstedt--to render these and other
personal services, the lack of which after long use is keenly felt.

Is was a hellish nuisance to a middle-aged man to have to get himself
out of his full-dress uniform.  One grew hot at the mere thought of
unfastening the shoulder belt and sword belt, collar hooks, buckles,
swivels, and so on.  Last, but not least, the final wrestle with the
polished, spurred jack boots....

"God be thanked, I am not wearing the cuirass!" he said to himself
devoutly, as he laid hand upon his bedroom door.

It swung back, and then his vexation passed from him.  On a little
table near the hearthside, where yet some embers of a fire glowed
redly, stood a little gayly-caparisoned Christmas tree.  Under its
branches, adorned with red-and-white tapers as yet unlighted, lay the
gifts that came from home.

He crossed the room in two long steps and stood smiling before the
little fir tree.  The purplish redness died out of his great cheeks
and jowl, the congested veins no longer stood out like ropes upon his
throat and temples.  The great eyes that had blazed with Satanic
pride softened into tenderness, as he picked up the gifts one by one
and looked at them.

"From His Daughter to Papachen," said an embroidered tobacco pouch.
"From Bill" and "From Herbert" a gold fusee box and a smoker's knife
were respectively labeled.  "From thy wife Johanna" was written on a
slip of paper attached to the case that contained a handsome cup of
Tula ware.  He turned the cup in his hands many times before he
returned it to its outer husk.  He said fondly, familiarly, as though
the giver were standing beside him:

"Little thou carest, thou good heart!--whether thou art wife to a
Chancellor of the North German Confederation, or the Chancellor of
the German Empire.  One object in life thou hast--and that is to get
the old man home again!"  After a moment he added, pitching the
Bavarian Treaty on the center table, unhooking and removing his sword
belt, and throwing it on the couch: "Babel must be bombarded, or thou
wilt not be pleased with me ... am I not a good pupil, to have
learned my lesson so well?"

The shoulder belt came off with a slight degree of twisting and
fumbling.  He laid it aside, and moved to the slaving glass, and by
its aid unfastened from his collar swivel the Iron Cross.  "Good!" he
commented, and laid it on top of a dispatch box on the center table.
Then he began slowly and methodically to unfasten the other Orders
from his breast.  As he pricked a finger with the pin of one in
wrenching at it angrily, it occurred to him that it would have been
perfectly feasible to have removed his dress tunic with all its
decorations, and this discovery stung him to wrath.

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_--am I, then, such a sheep's head?" he said
angrily to himself.  Something dropped upon the floor with a tinkle
and rolled away merrily under a chair, leaving its owner with the
thick silver pin that had secured it gripped between his finger and
thumb.  It was the medallion bestowed upon him in '42 for an act of
gallantry, the obverse a shield of silver on a circle, bearing a
red-enameled Prussian eagle, and on the reverse the inscription:
"_Für Rettung aus Gefahr_."

The pin remained in his hand.  Cursing his own clumsiness, he took
the lighted candle he had placed upon the center table upon entering,
and stooped to recover the evasive prize.  Both hands were required
for the task, that was quickly apparent.  Half unconsciously he
reverted to a habit for which his wife had often playfully scolded
him--nipped the broken silver pin between his teeth and bent down to
resume his search upon the floor.

As he stooped, the detonation of a driving charge and the deafening
roar and shriek of a huge shell were followed by an ear-splitting
explosion.  His practiced ear told him.  that the shell had been
fired from the Fortress of St. Valérien.  Half a dozen others
followed in rapid succession.  No alarm trumpet sounded.  Dogs
barked, near and far, the echoes of the cannonade rattled among the
woods and high grounds, then died out.  He said to himself: "Those
sugar plums have done damage somewhere near St. Germain....  Now,
then, where is this runaway medal?"

As he queried, a sudden spasm of the windpipe shot him to the
perpendicular.  He coughed and hawked as he had never done before.
With a hand upon his side, he coughed, straining horribly.  With
streaming, starting eyes he coughed, clutching at his throat.

And then, with a sudden stab of pain beneath the uvula and a
strangling access of coughing, he realized that a familiar home
prediction had been fulfilled:

"_Otto, you will certainly swallow that pin!..._"

He could almost hear the voice of his wife speaking.  How absurd! he
thought, and laughed; and the agony in his lacerated gullet brought
on a fit of choking worse than those that had gone before.  He seized
the candle and held it to his face before the shaving mirror, opening
his powerful jaws to their widest and straining his eyes that were
too blind with tears to see his own swollen, discolored features.  He
spat furiously, ejecting showers of saliva streaked with blood, but
not the obstacle that was choking him....  He thrust his hand into
his mouth, and groped as far down his throat as his fingers could
reach--all to no avail....

"_Help!..._"

He gasped the word, realizing that if no help came, he was a dead
man.  And he seized the bell rope and rang furiously, until the rope
came down in his hand as had that of the reception-room a day or so
previously, followed by a long trail of rusty wire that, when tugged,
evoked no metal clang below.

"Help!  For the love of God!" he croaked, and whirling vertigo seized
him.  Whooping with a dreadful croupy intake, he tripped over a
footstool, and fell upon his hands and knees, and struggled up again
in a last strangling effort, and staggered to the door.

The door handle seemed to stick, or could it be that his grasp had
lost its power?  In the light of the gas and his yet flaring candle,
he looked at his knuckles and saw that they were turning blackish
blue....  A wave of blackness rose and fell, swamping consciousness.
He emerged from drowning waters, and found himself upon the landing,
gripping some round object that proved to be the wrenched-off door
handle, and moaning in the whisper that he thought a shout:

"Help, help, help!..."

Bismarck, the man whom Kings and Emperors meant when they spoke of
Prussia--the great Minister who had made three Wars--was dying.
Would no one come?  Not one of those who loved the man would ever
know the true story of his sordid, solitary ending....  Not one of
those who hated him but would hear every ugly detail of it, and
recount it for others, smiling at its grim, grotesque absurdity....

Choked by a pin!...  An end rather less noble for a great Chancellor
than being run over by a donkey cart or smothered in a midden pit
full of liquid manure....

Someone was groaning horribly, close beside him.  Deep ruckling,
gasping groans with a rattle and a catch midway.  Were they his own
death groans?  What was this?  The walls were melting and vanishing.
Clear, vivid, definite, there unrolled before his filming eyes a
picture of Varzin, his Pomeranian country home.  It was Spring.  The
dark pines about the house shone as though newly varnished.  The
larches were caparisoned with tassels of pale green.  The blue sky
was vivid as Persian turquoise.  He saw his daughter in a white dress
step out from the low wide porch and stand smiling upon the terrace.
She had a bunch of primroses in her belt, and his great hound Tyras
had followed her and was rubbing his great head against her sleeve.

"Dying!" he tried to say to her.  "Help your father!" ... But it
seemed to him that he uttered nothing but a groan.  There was a
thundering in his ears like the noise of a field battery.  His great
bulk reeled toward her....  He pitched forward and fell heavily....

He heard a scared voice crying: "Monseigneur!..." and knew no more.




LXXVI

Juliette had not gone to bed, this snowy night of the Noël.  She had
said her Rosary and waited until the Christmas carillon.  Then she
knelt and prayed for her own pardon, for light and guidance, for a
blessing upon those living friends she held most dear, for the souls
of the beloved departed.  And then she had waited, pacing solitary in
her bedroom or sitting by her fire, for the sound of Breagh's return.

Madame Potier had gone to the Midnight Mass at the Cathedral.  There
would be crowds of communicants--she might not reach home before
three.  And in her absence had Juliette wished to sleep, sleep would
have been banished by the sounds of revelry going on in the regions
belowstairs.

Those first shouts for the Kaiser had been followed by others for the
Chancellor.  Even in her remote eyrie she could hear the clinking of
glasses and the popping of corks.  Then after a wild outburst of
cheering she had seen, peeping between the frost flowers on her
window into the snowy, moonlit garden, the great figure in the white
Cuirassier cloak move down the path between the snow-laden trees.

She was possessed by a great sense of loneliness, and a vague unreal
sensation of living somebody else's life, and not the life proper of
Juliette Bayard.  She locked her door and built up the fire to a
cheerful hearth blaze, and sat upon the rug in her white dressing
gown, combing and brushing her glorious hair.

Never again need those superb waves of jet-black spun silk be
confined in the chenille net of Madame Charles Tessier.  One could be
charming if one chose--there was no grim reason for being ugly,
thought Mademoiselle, as she brushed and brushed....

What was that?

So strange a sound from below that she dropped comb and hairbrush and
sprang to her feet quivering....  She had heard such a groan uttered
when the lance of the Uhlan had plunged through the body of my Cousin
Boisset....

Again! ... the sound of a door thrust violently open.  Heavy
footsteps thudded on the gaslit landing of the next floor, and a
muffled voice cried out as though for help.

A man's voice....  Again it cried.  No voice sounded in answer.  She
unlocked her door, and set her foot upon the stairs.

A few steps down....  Then she saw him, the tottering giant with the
distorted, blue face, and the open mouth that trickled with saliva
and blood.  What had befallen Juliette's enemy and France's pitiless
oppressor?  His huge staring eyes were fixed on her.  Tears rolled
from them as the deep groans issued from his gaping mouth and his
broad chest heaved and labored vainly for air.

"_Choking!  Help!_" his gesture seemed to say to her, and a terrible
shudder convulsed her as the huge body crashed down prone at her feet.

With a strange mingling of pity and aversion she knelt down beside
him and looked at him closely by the light of the flaring gas jet
that illuminated the landing and stairs.

He had turned a little in falling.  His blackening face and staring,
agonized eyes spoke to his desperate condition....  What was to be
done?... The obstruction in the throat must be removed somehow....
She rose up and went into the empty room upon her left hand, and felt
in the darkness for the bell.  There was none.  The bell rope had
been pulled down by the hand of the Minister, for this was the
torture chamber, where M. Thiers underwent his periodical ordeal of
thumbscrew and rack.

Air....  He must have fresh air.  She desperately flung both the
windows open, admitting a gush of piercing cold.  He still groaned,
but more faintly.  The man was dying.  Was not this the Judgment of
Heaven?

In the hour of his triumph the sword had fallen.  France would be
saved--there would be no bombardment of Paris if the enemy were to
die to-night.  This she told herself, standing in the sharp draught
from the open windows, and knew a thrill of intolerable triumph,
thinking:

"Our Lord has delivered him into hands as weak as mine!"

_Ting!..._

Her heart leaped and stood still.  She looked breathlessly from the
window.  Along the middle of the snowy Rue de Provence, where
pedestrians must walk to avoid the dangers of the frozen sideways, a
lantern moved, carried by a squat, muffled shape.  A taller figure
followed, moving steadily.

_Ting-ting-ting!..._

A shock and thrill of mingled awe and terror passed through her.  To
some dying Catholic, saint or sinner, in the dawn of this day of the
Christ-birth, the Body of the Virgin-born was being conveyed....  Was
it not to aid a soul in dire temptation--two souls, it might be--that
He had bidden His minister pass this way?

She bent the knee and made the Sign of the Cross, trembling, then
rose and sped back to the suffocating man.  With a strength that she
could not have believed herself possessed of, she raised his
discolored head upon her lap....  His great jaws were wide open.  She
thrust the tiny hand within them.  Shuddering, sickening, she probed
with her slender fingers, thrusting them down into the contracting,
gulping throat.

Something bright projected beneath the swollen uvula, wedged firmly
into the membrane, blocking the orifice of the trachea.  She nipped
the projecting end in the little fingers and pulled.  It yielded.  He
gave a gulp of relief.  As the big teeth snapped together, she
plucked the little hand from peril, bringing with it the broken
silver pin.




LXXVII

He was instantly, tremendously sick, as an overeaten ogre might have
been in an Eastern story.  When he had finished vomiting, he heaved
up his huge, shuddering bulk.  She put her slight shoulder under the
groping hand, and guided him.  With this slight aid he reached his
room.  The couch stood drawn forward at an angle toward the
fireplace.  He staggered to it, let himself drop upon it, and said,
in a groan:

"Drink!..."

He pointed to the night stand at his bedside.  When she poured from
the jug that stood there into the glass and brought it to him, he
gulped the contents greedily.

"Barley water ... good for the throat!" he gasped, giving the glass
back.  She filled it again, and again he emptied it.

His sweat-dabbled face was regaining a more natural color.  She went
to the washstand, filled a small shaving basin with cold water from
the hand jug, and brought it with a fine clean towel to his side.
She dipped the towel in the water and laved his face and forehead.
That he experienced relief and refreshment from this she saw by the
placid air with which he submitted, leaning his head back against the
pillowed sofa end, and closing his eyes.

She dried his face, and suddenly the great eyes opened.  The voice of
the Chancellor said:

"There....  That will do!"

From the passive victim he had suddenly reverted to the master;
potent--authoritative....

"Go to bed, Mademoiselle de Bayard, and sleep," he told her.  "I am
comfortable ... I shall do well enough!"

She replaced the basin and towel in silence, bent her head to the
figure sitting upright on the sofa, and moved noiselessly to the
door.  As she touched the broken handle, he said to her abruptly:

"You will be silent upon the subject of to-night's--misadventure?..."

She answered:

"I will be silent, Monseigneur!"

He said, lifting a finger to detain her yet another instant:

"Do not err in supposing me ungrateful.  I know very well that you
have saved my life!"

A shudder passed through her slight figure.  She averted her eyes,
remembering....  He finished:

"I lunch with the King at the Prefecture to-morrow.  I will see you
before I leave the house."

"As you will, Monseigneur!"

He added with something like a twinkle:

"With regard to all that ... _débris_ upon the landing ... it will
not be the first time Niederstedt has been guilty in that way.  Good
night, Mademoiselle--or, rather, good morning....  Hark!  Was not
that the bell of the house door?"

"I--am not sure, Monseigneur!"' she said, in hesitation, for so
ragged and weakly a peal had been evolved by the ringer that the
sound might have passed unnoticed by ears less keen than his.

"They are all asleep or drunk belowstairs!"  He began to raise
himself stiffly from the sofa.  "I will go down...."

"No; I will go!" she said.

And she left the room.  He let himself sink back on the sofa.
"_Grosser Gott!_" he said to himself.  "How near a thing! ... And
that the little Fury should have stopped the brand from quenching....
Well, now, at this rate, I may live another thirty years.  Not that I
should find much zest in a prolonged spell of power and authority.
The King-Emperor in the ordinary course must die before long.  My
master in that event would be a good-natured booby, who in assuming
the supreme dignities of Imperial authority would value the stage
setting beyond anything else!"

He quoted with acerbity increased by recent suffering:

"'Pomp and solemnity' ... 'The ancient Crown of Charlemagne from
Vienna' ... 'I shall write to my wife to-night' ... Pray do!...  And
while Your Royal Highness is about it you had better consult little
Prince William, who would probably give you as valuable advice."

His thoughts reverted to the fair-haired, puny-limbed eleven-year-old
urchin in kilt and plaid of Royal Stuart tartans....  "Now," said he,
"what sort of a future Emperor may be enclosed in that husk?...  That
the boy has a crippled left arm, and a capital set of sharp teeth,
which he uses on the calves of his Military Governor and tutors, is
practically all I know of him....  Come in!"

He had been so lost in thought as to miss the sound of chains undone
and bolts drawn back, though he had shivered unconsciously as the
opening of the hall door had admitted a volume of fresh, piercing air
to the heated house.  Now he reared himself upright upon the sofa,
stared for a moment at the figure that responded to his gruff "Come
in!" and burst into an irresistible laugh.

"Quite right, Mr. Breagh!" he said, in his clear and fluent English.
"I told you to come up to me at whatever hour you might get back.
But I forgot that you would naturally visit Madame de Bayard in the
costume proper to Jean Jacques Potier, to whom I suppose that
extraordinary overcoat and the wolfskin cap must have belonged.
Frankly, I did not recognize you....  The condition of your clothes,
and that bandage on your forehead are responsible, more than my lapse
of memory.  You certainly look rather shaken.  Let me hope you have
sustained no serious hurt?"

P. C. Breagh grinned mirthlessly, and looked ruefully down at his
snowy boots and trousers, from which the melting snow was beginning
to drip in little rills upon the carpeted floor.  By the light of the
two gas lamps depending above the table, it could be seen that the
gory bandage surmounting his pale face had been applied by an
experienced hand.  He needed no immediate surgical aid.  But his blue
lips and drawn and pallid features betrayed him exhausted.  The
Minister, noting this, pointed to a chair.

"Sit down," he said, "and rest before you speak!  There is brandy in
that flask that stands upon the bureau....  But something hot would
be better for you--that is what you most need."

There was a sound upon the landing ... a faint tap upon the door
panel.

"See who it is!" said the Chancellor.

As Breagh rose, the door opened, wide enough to admit a little tray
bearing two steaming coffee cups.

"Capital!" said His Excellency, addressing the unseen cup-bearer.
"Now, that I call an excellent thought!"

He took a cup from the tray Breagh offered, bidding him:

"Sit down and drink the other.  I should have got none except for
you!"  When the steaming cup was empty, "Proceed," he said, ignoring
the gray daylight outlining the curtain poles and filtering between
the drawn curtains.

"At what hour did you get to Maisons Lafitte?  For I presume you did
get there?"

P. C. Breagh said:

"I got there at about two o'clock....  I had an appointment at the
Cathedral, otherwise I should have started before."

"I hope she was pretty!" said the Minister, smiling.

P. C. Breagh went on, as though he had not heard:

"The snow was beginning to freeze.  It was not such bad walking, but
that hill of St. Germain was a winder, and in the Forest I lost my
way....  If a party of men--peasants in sheepskin caps and
jackets--forest keepers possibly--had not turned out of an avenue and
kept marching ahead, I might never have got as far as the Seine
road...."

"The men were marching, and not walking," commented the Minister, and
his great brows scowled, and his bulldog jowl hardened as he added:
"And they carried guns, or you would not have taken them for
keepers....  I have no doubt that they were _Francs-tireurs_."

"I lost them where the road winds by the Seine," P. C. Breagh
continued.  "And then I had a real stroke of luck.  I came across a
hack cab from Versailles at a regular standstill.  The snow had
balled in the wretched horse's feet, and the driver was as drunk as
David's sow.  The fare was asleep inside, but he woke as I opened the
cab door and flashed one of the lamps in his face, and then he
said"--the narrator unconsciously gave the tone and accent of the
Doctor--"'By the piper that played before Moses, my boyo!  I was
dreaming of you, and here you are.'"

The Minister broke in:

"That man was the English correspondent of _The Times_ newspaper.  He
is of the same surname, though no relative of Odo Russell, the
English Envoy, who has been sent out here upon a Mission to our
German Court....  Ill-natured diplomatists whisper that Great Britain
is jealous of the great successes of Prussia, and does not welcome
the prospect of a United Imperial Germany.  _Au fond_, we Germans
have a kind of sentimental regard for your nation.  She is an
offshoot of the great Germanic stem--it is impossible that we should
not regard her as nearer to us than others....  Though, should we
ever seriously quarrel, it may be found that the bitterest variance
may exist between those of the same blood....  And so you have never
confided to your friend the secret of your presence in Versailles!
Reticence in the young is an unusual gift.  Possibly he gave you a
lift in his vehicle?"

"----Till the unlucky Rosinante gave out," acquiesced Breagh, "and we
had to leave her with her Jehu at the wreck of the railway station,
and then the Doctor stopped at the diggings of the friends he was on
the way to look up, a half squadron of Barnekow's Hussars who are
quartered in a deserted chateau.  They gave me some sandwiches and
beer, and then I went on by myself to the Villa Laon where Madame de
Bayard"--he stopped and added in a low voice--"used to live."

Something in the tone attracted the attention of the Chancellor.  He
repeated:

"Used to....  Does she not, then, live there now?  Has she gone with
M. de Straz--the pair of love birds together?..."

Said P. C. Breagh, seized with a shudder that knocked his knees
together, and speaking in a low voice:

"I--I beg of Your Excellency to spare her your irony....  Madame de
Bayard is dead!"

"So!..."

The Minister's ejaculation was followed by the order:

"Now the details!...  Has she died naturally, or by accident--or by a
murderer's hand?"

P. C. Breagh said, lowering his voice apprehensively:

"She was killed by a shell.  There was a bombardment from Mont
Valérien....  It broke out at about a quarter past two this
morning--just as I reached the Villa Laon...."

"Ah! now I understand how you got that love token on your forehead!"
said the Minister.

Breagh nodded, and wiped his wet forehead with a blood-stained
handkerchief, and shuddered and went on:

"Nobody had gone to bed when I got to the villa.  The blinds of what
I could see was a dining-room were drawn up and the curtains all
drawn back.  The room was brilliantly lighted, lots of mirrors and
crystal girandoles.  It was like a scene on the stage, looking at it
from the snowy garden.  Shin-deep in snow, because the paths had not
been cleared....  You could not tell where the paths were, in fact,
so I steered my course by the big shining window.  Then I saw him,
moving before me----"

Queried His Excellency:

"By him, you mean whom?..."

"A man," said P. C. Breagh, "whom I saw moving along before me,
taking cover behind snowy bushes and clumps of frosted prairie grass.
When he stood up, I saw that he was short in figure and had immensely
broad shoulders.  I was quite sure that I had seen the fellow before.
In fact----"

"In fact," the Minister sharply interrupted, "you recognized him as
the man who posed as M. Charles Tessier, and who can have been nobody
but M. Straz.  Now tell me, whom was he watching?  Madame and a
companion, I venture to guess?"  He added, as P. C. Breagh assented:
"What was the man?  A civilian or an officer?"

P. C. Breagh answered, repressing another shudder:

"A tall, fair officer of the Prussian Guard Infantry.  He and Madame
were at supper, or they had just finished.  He had opened a fresh
bottle of champagne and was leaning over to fill Madame's glass when
I noticed the short man standing still, watching them closely.  He
seemed to have his right hand in his pocket.  He drew it out and
then--I don't know very well what happened.  There was the heavy boom
of a big gun, and a shell came shrieking like an express train....  I
remember how the spitting flare of the fuse lit up the sky.  And
there was a terrific crash--and something hit me on the head--a bit
of masonry, it must have been--for when I came to myself other shells
were hurtling, and hitting, and bursting....  One smashed the stables
of the chateau where the Hussars are quartered, and another has dug a
crater, they tell me, in the side of the Terrace of St. Germain.  The
flashes made everything show up clear like lightning, and I picked
myself up....  The blood was running down into my eyes, blinding me.
But I'm not likely to forget what I saw.  It was ... so awfully
stagey ... so like a picture of the sensational, blood-curdling,
highly colored kind."

"Go on!"

"It was like this.  The upper story of the Villa had been shaved
off--simply.  There was the interior of the dining-room before me,
all color and mirrors and gilding and twinkling wax candles in
crystal girandoles.  The French windows had been shattered, and there
was a great hole in the ceiling.  On the mantelshelf, just in front
of me, between two Sèvres candlesticks, was a clock, the hands
pointing to half-past two.  There were Sèvres figures on each side of
the clock--I have seen them here in the shop windows, '_Pierrot qui
rit_' and '_Pierrot qui pleure_.'  The crying Pierrot had been
smashed by the shell splinter that shivered the mantel mirror, but
the laughing Pierrot was untouched.  He seemed to be holding his
sides and screaming at Valverden sprawling across the table with his
skull shattered, and Madame de Bayard sitting stone-dead in her
chair.  She had the cigarette in her fingers, still alight....  It
must have been painless....  There was only a small blue hole in her
temple--just here."

The Minister was repeating:

"Valverden!...  Are you clear that you mean Count Max Valverden?...
But of course you are!  There is no other officer of that name in the
Prussian Guard Infantry.  How you came to be acquainted you shall
tell me to-morrow."  He laughed harshly, looking at the clock upon
the mantel.  "I should say to-day, at a somewhat later hour."  He
added, as Breagh rose: "Have you told anything of this matter to
Mademoiselle de Bayard?  Then, I advise you, do not enlighten her at
all.  Or, if you must do so, tell her after you are married!"

He drove the sentence home with another that left the listener
gasping:

"For of course you will marry, you are capitally suited to one
another.  The mother exists no longer and M. Straz if he escaped,
which is most likely, will not be able to interfere.  Let me
recommend you to get some rest.  You will require it.  For at twelve
you leave Versailles with Mademoiselle de Bayard en route for
England.  Now go!..."




LXXVIII

P. C. Breagh and Juliette met upon the morrow in the same spot near
the rose tree that had borne pink blossoms undismayed through the
bitter wintry months.

"You have bestowed upon me no Christmas present, Monsieur," Juliette
said to him gravely.  "Now I will have you gather one of those roses
and give it to me...."

He strode into the drift, mid-leg deep, and cut a bud that was upon
the sheltered side next the wall.

"Be careful of the thorns, lest they prick you!" Juliette cried to
him.  "Do not cut your fingers!  Do not get wet!"

"You shall not have this rose," he said, withholding the frozen
flower, "until you have given my Christmas gift to me!"

Her blue eyes rose, brimming, to meet his.

"Ah! what is there I can give you?  Tell me, my friend!" she said
softly.

He got out, blushing, and swallowing a lump that rose in his throat:

"We have been through so much ... we have seen strange and terrible
things together!...  We have shared dangers ... we have seen a great
nation in the death throes....  Nothing could ever make us strangers
whatever came to pass....  But now we are going back to England.
Before we leave this garden where we have been so happy----"

"It is true....  We have been happy here!" she answered.

Winged smiles were hovering about her mouth.  Jeweled gleams played
between the black fringes of her eyelashes, as though fairy
kingfishers were diving for some new joy in those sapphire depths.
She asked demurely, as the clumsy male creature choked and boggled:

"What do you seek, Monsieur?  Some souvenir....  Some token of
friendship?"

He said, in a low, dogged voice:

"I have never asked mere friendship from you.  But if you--if
you----"  He got it out with a desperate effort:

"Before we leave this ... if you would kiss me--once..."

She drew back.  A terrible dignity vested her sloping shoulders.
Modesty veiled her eyes.  He was going miserably away, when she
beckoned to him, with that splendid sweep of the arm that might have
belonged to Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde-Britomart and the whole covey
of Romance Ideals....  He returned....  She spoke, and her eyes were
wavering under the eager fire of his:

"See you well, Monsieur, a young lady cannot bestow a gift of that
kind.  It is for the gentleman, having obtained consent, to take..."

Breagh caught her to his broad breast and snatched the coveted
guerdon.  He cried to her in wonder and triumph:

"You love me!...  A fellow like me?...  And you will be my wife?  We
are not going to England to be parted!  I am not a beggar any more!
I will try again for my practicing degree in Medicine, and get it!  I
will write books and make a name for myself in Literature.  But not
unless you'll marry me!...  Oh, Juliette! say when you will marry me?"

She said, with downcast eyelids that veiled laughter, though the rose
flush had dyed her very temples, and the beating of her heart shook
her slight frame:

"Monsieur, my grandmother would have answered: '_Under the
circumstances, the marriage cannot take place too soon....  Once a
young girl has been kissed, she must be married._'  And"--the smile
peeped out--"I was taught always to obey my grandmother...."

"Admirably spoken!" said the Chancellor.

He had come upon the lovers, of set purpose it may have been.  Now he
stood surveying them in an ogreish, yet not unamiable fashion, as
they stood before him hand in hand.

He said, and the resonant tones were veiled by a painful hoarseness,
of which the reason was known to Mademoiselle alone:

"Mr. Breagh, Count Hatzfeldt has the necessary papers of which I
spoke to you.  You will find him in the drawing-room waiting to
complete some slight formalities inseparable from the granting of
passports in time of War....  Good-bye to you, good luck and all
happiness.  I am on the point of departure for the Prefecture, so I
shall not again see you.  For a moment I detain Mademoiselle."

As Breagh bowed to Juliette and His Excellency and hastened toward
the house, the Chancellor said to Juliette:

"It is too cold to stand here ... it will be wiser to walk a little.
There is a path that leads us out near the wall at the bottom of the
shrubbery."

It was where the mask of the Satyr, now with long icicles hanging
from his eyebrows and goat-beard, jutted from the ivy of the boundary
wall.

The little spring had not frozen, the ferns and grasses round its
margin were still quite green.  A few pinched violets peeped from
among their broad leaves.  Juliette stooped and gathered one or two
of the faintly-fragrant blossoms and a leaf of fern and a sprig of
ivy.  As she slipped them into the inner pocket of her jacket, the
Chancellor spoke:

"Mademoiselle, I have to thank you for my life.....  Now, last
night----"  He squarely confronted her, his powerful eyes looking
down upon the little figure so frail and slender.  "Now, last night,"
he repeated, "had you really believed that my death meant the
salvation of your country....  Well!...  Did you not hold me in the
hollow of your hand?"

She met his stern regard with a look that was clear as crystal.  She
said in her silver tones:

"It is true, Monseigneur.  Our Lord granted me my wish.  You so
great, so strong, so powerful, were helpless as an infant....  I had
only not to put out my finger--and you were a dead man!  The power of
Life and Death was mine, yet I could not let you perish, for Almighty
God would not permit it....  He willed that you should not die....
Crush France or spare her, you will not be carrying out the wishes of
Count Bismarck.  You will do what God permits you to do--no more and
no less!  But when you are most strong and most powerful ... when you
play with Kings and Emperors like pawns, then I ask you to remember
Juliette de Bayard!"

She quivered in every limb, but she went on resolutely:

"You are not a good man, Monseigneur!...  Hard, subtle, arrogant,
cruel and unscrupulous, God made you to be the Fate of France.  One
day she will lift up her face from the mire into which you have
trodden it, and the star will be burning unquenched upon her
forehead.  We may both be dead before that day dawns.  But rest
assured that when next your armies cross the Rhine they will not gain
an easy victory!...  We shall be prepared and ready, Monseigneur,
when the Germans come again!"

He looked at her and listened to her in silence, perhaps in wonder.
She seemed the Spirit of France incarnate, a pale reed shaken by
prophetic winds from Heaven.

"It may be so," he said to her gravely.  "And now, Mademoiselle de
Bayard, I shall ask you to give me your hand at parting!"

"Take it, Monseigneur," she bade him.

He held it in his an instant, saying in his clear-cut French:

"I desire no evil to France when I say that I wish that every
Frenchman had a daughter like you!..."  He added: "Thanks for the
_beignets_....  I shall always remember you when I am served with
them....  And for last night again thank you!...  Farewell and all
happiness attend you, Mademoiselle!"

His heavy footsteps crunched the snow.  He was gone, and she had
almost called after him:

"Monseigneur, I do not hate you so much as I have said...."


On the morning of the 27th of January eighteen seventy-one French
guns on Fort Montrouge had been keeping up a brisk cannonade of the
German investing-works.  Meeting no response their thunder ceased.
There, upon the east and north of beleaguered Paris--with a
simultaneous uprush of fierce white flame from the muzzles of seventy
giant howitzers, with the detonation of driving-charges, and the
piercing scream and deafening crash of the percussion of Krupp's huge
siege-projectiles, the bombardment of the doomed Queen City of Cities
had begun....

A few moments before, as Juliette de Bayard and her lover set foot
upon the steamer-pier at Dover, an aged French lady, who had stopped
Count Bismarck on the steps of the Prefecture, had imploringly said
to him:

"_O! Monseigneur, donnez nous la paix!_"

And the Iron Chancellor had replied to her almost smilingly:

"Dear lady, it is with a peace as with a marriage, there must be two
parties willing to conclude the contract....  I am ready to make
peace, but the other side is not!"



THE END











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