Front matter (continued 15)

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.