Part 13

“Taking our respective loads of aims and ambitions and responsibilities with us,” said Bertham. “My badly-housed Military Invalid Pensioners for whom I want tight roofs, and dry walls, and comfortable beds. My Sandhurst Cadets, trussed up in absurd trappings, and harassed with rules as trumpery--hide-bound with conditions quite as detrimental to health as their cut-and-dried discipline, and innumerable supererogatory belts, straps, and buckles. My Regimental Schools, where illiterate soldiers and their wives are to learn to read and write and cipher; and my Infants’ Classes, where the soldier’s children may be taught as well. My Improved Married Quarters, which should--but do not, more’s the pity!--occupy a separate block in every Barracks in the Kingdom, where the women and their men may live in decent privacy, and not under conditions not at all distantly recalling--to our shame! and the Red Tapeism that preserves these conditions in their unadorned and ancient ugliness ought to blush the redder for it!--the primitive promiscuities of the Stone Age. With a distinct bias in favor of that period!”

* * * * *

His handsome face was bitter and dark with anger; his voice, though barely raised above the level of ordinary fireside chat, rang and vibrated with passionate indignation.

“It has been borne in on me, Ada, in God knows how many hours of weariness and bitter disappointment, that our Peninsular triumphs--achieved in what we are accustomed to call the good old days--are a heavy clog upon our advancement as a nation now, and a cloud upon our eyes. They were not good old days, Ada, as windbaggy orators like to call them; they were bad old days, inhuman old days, cruel old days, when Napoleon Bonaparte possessed France upon a bridal bed of bloody corpses; and ragged, underfed, untaught, unsheltered soldiers upheld, in what neglect, what misery and suffering, you and I can barely realize, amidst Famine and Slaughter and Pestilence and Devastation hideous and indescribable, the traditional glory of the British nation, the strength and fire and power of British Arms. Let us have done with the pride of those days! Let us cease to boast of them! Let us prove our advancement in Civilization, Humanity, and Science by no longer treating these our fellow-creatures as human pawns in a devilish game of chess, or as thoughtless children treat toy-soldiers; to be moved hither and thither at will, swept off the board when necessary, and jostled promiscuously into dark and stuffy boxes until we are pleased to call for them again! Since Great Britain owes so much to her Army and her Navy, let her treat the men who serve her by land and sea with respect, and decent consideration. And in so far as Governments and Administrations of the old days ignored their rights to honest, humane, and Christian usage, let us have done with those damned old days forever, and while the life is red in us, hurry on the new!”

“They cannot come too quickly!” she said, giving back his earnest look. “Surely by raising the moral tone, cultivating the mental faculties, and improving the social condition of the private soldier, he is nerved and tempered, not softened and unstrung.”

“As it is we owe him honor,” said Bertham, “that, with so many disadvantages as he labors under to-day, and in the face of the bad example too often set him as to moral conduct and neglect of duty by his superiors, he is what we know him to be!”

“Ah, that is true--most true!” she answered, breaking the silence in which she had sat listening to the silvery voice of which even Bertham’s enemies admitted the singular charm. “May the day soon dawn when we shall see him what we hope he will become!”

“There will be a dark night before its dawning,” Bertham returned, and his smile had sadness in its very brilliancy. “For England must lose much to win that more, be assured.”

He added as his look met hers, seeing the slight bewildered knitting of her eyebrows:

“There is a grand old white head nodding at the upper end of the Green Council Board at the War Office, or soundly sleeping, in the inner sanctum at the covered passage-end that has always been known as the office of the Commander-in-Chief,--that Britain, in her gratitude and loyal regard and tender reverence for its great owner,--and God forbid that I should rob him of one jot or tittle of what has been so gloriously won!--has left there long years since the brain within it became incapable, by the natural and inevitable decay of its once splendid faculties, of planning and carrying out any wholesome, needful reform in our Army’s organization--even of listening to those who have suggestions to offer, or plans to submit, with anything but an old man’s testy impatience of what seems new. This is deplored by personages nominally subordinate, really wielding absolute power. ‘Sad, sad!’ they say, ‘but the nation would have it so.’ Yet little more than a year ago, when, as by a miracle, the strength and vigor of the old warrior’s prime seemed, if only for an instant, to have returned to him--when the dim fires of the gray eagle-glance blazed out again, and the trembling hand, strung to vigor for the nonce, penned that most electrifying letter,--published a few weeks back by what the New England Party regard as a wise stroke of policy, and Officialdom as an unpardonable indiscretion,--that letter declaring the country’s defenses to be beggarly and inadequate, its naval arsenals neglected, its dockyards undermanned, its forts not half-garrisoned.... What sort of criticism did it evoke? Those who were openly antagonistic declared it to be preposterous; those who were loyal treated its utterances with contemptuous, galling indulgence.... To me it was as though a prophetic voice had spoken in warning from the tomb! And even before the graven stone sinks down over the weary old white head, Ada, and the laurels are withered that lie above, the country he loved and served so grandly may be doing pennance in dust and ashes for that warning it despised!”

“And if the War-call sounded to-morrow,” she said, with her intent look upon him, and her long white fingers knitted about her knee, “and the need arose--as it would arise--for a man of swift decision and vigorous action to lead us in the field--upon whom would we rely? Who would step into the breach, and wield the _baton_?”

“A man,” returned Bertham, “sixty-six years old, who served on the Duke’s staff and lost his left arm at Waterloo; who has never held any command or had any experience of directing troops in War, and whose life, for forty years or so, has been spent in the discharge of the duties, onerous but not active, devolving upon a Military Secretary. The whole question as to fitness or not fitness turns upon an ‘if.’”

The speaker spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly, and a whimsical spark of humor gleamed in the look he turned upon the listener, as a star might shine through the wild blue twilight of a day of gale and storm, as he resumed:

“If the possession of the Wellingtonian manner,--combined with an empty sleeve--all honor to the brave arm that used to be inside it!--a manner full of urbanity and courtesy--nicely graduated and calculated according to the rank and standing of the person addressed; and admirable command of two Continental languages, and a discreet but distinct appreciation of high company and good living, unite to make an ideal Commander-in-Chief, why, Dalgan will be the man of men!...”

“But surely we need something more,” she said, meeting Bertham’s glance with doubt and questioning.

“Something indeed!” he returned dryly. “But be kind to me, and let me forget my bogies for a little in hearing of all the good that you have done and mean to do.... Tell me of your experiences at Kaiserswerke amongst the Lutheran Deaconesses--tell me about your visit to the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul at the Hospital of the Charité, or your sojourn with the _dames religieuses_ of St. Augustine at the Hôtel Dieu. Or tell me about your ancient, super-annuated, used-governesses. I should like to know something of them, poor old souls!...”

* * * * *

“They are not all old,” she explained, “though many of them are used-up, and all, or nearly all, are incapable; and Bertham, with a very few exceptions, sensible and ladylike as most of them are, they are so grossly ignorant of the elementary principles of education that one wonders how the poor pretense of teaching was kept up at all? And how it was that common honesty did not lead them to take service as housemaids? and how the parents of their pupils--Heaven help them!--could have been blind enough to confide the training of their children to such feeble, incompetent hands?”

“It is a crying evil,” said Bertham, “or, rather, a whimpering one, and needs to be dealt with. One day we will change all that.... As to these sick and sorrowful women, the generation that will rise up to take their places will be qualified, I hope, to teach, by having learned; and the quality of their teaching will, I hope again, be guaranteed by a University diploma. And, superior knowledge having ceased to mean the temporary possession of the lesson-book, children will learn to treat their teachers with respect, and we shall hear fewer tales of the despised governess.”

She returned, glancing at Bertham’s handsome, resolute face, and noting the many fine lines beginning to draw themselves about the corners of the eyes and mouth, the worn hollows of the temples and cheekbones, and the deepening caves from which the brilliant eyes looked out in scorn, or irony, or appealing, ingratiating gentleness.

* * * * *

“All governesses are not despised or despicable. There are many instances, Robert, where the integrity and conscientiousness of the poor dependent gentlewoman has held up a standard of conduct for the pupil, well or ill taught, to follow which has borne good fruit in after-years. We have a worthy lady here, a governess long resident in Paris, against whose exquisite French I polish up my own when I have time--a rather scarce commodity in this house!... Miss Caroline Smithwick has been cast on the mercy of the world in her old age, after many years of faithful service, because she dared tell her wealthy employer that a claim he pursued and pressed was dishonest and base. The man’s son thinks with her, and has chosen to be poor rather than profit by riches--and, I gather, rank--so gained. It is a wholesome story,” she said, “and when he told me to-day of his intention to support the gentle old soul who was so true to him, out of his pay as an officer of the French Army,--I could have clapped my hands and cried aloud--but I did not,--for the Superintendent of a Governesses’ Home must be, above all, discreet;--_‘Bravo, M. Hector Dunoisse!’_”

“‘Dunoisse, Dunoisse’?” He turned the name upon his tongue several times over, as though its flavor were in some measure familiar to him. “Dunoisse.... Can it be a son of the dyed and painted and padded old lion, with false claws and teeth and a name from the wigmaker’s, who was Bonaparte’s _aide_ at Marengo and cut a dashing figure at the Tuileries in 1804? The Emperor created him Field-Marshal after Austerlitz, and small blame to him!... He ran away with a Bavarian Princess after the Restoration--a Princess who happened to be a professed nun, and somewhere about 1828, when the son of their union may have been seven or eight years old,--when the Throne of St. Louis was rocking under that cumbersome old wooden puppet Charles X.,--when the tricolor was on the point of breaking out at the top of every national flagstaff in France,--when you got a whiff of violets from the button-hole of every Imperialist who passed you in the street,--when the Catholic religion was about to be once more deprived of State protection and popular support, Marshal Dunoisse, swashbuckling old Bonapartist that he is, reclaimed the lady’s large dowry from her Convent, and with the aid of De Martignac, Head of the Ministry of that date, succeeded in getting it.”

“It is the son of the very man you describe,” she told him; “who visited his old governess here to-day.”

Bertham shrugged his shoulders, and, leaning down, silently stroked the sleek cat, white-pawed and whiskered, and coated in Quaker gray, that lay outstretched at ease upon the hearthrug. But his eyes were on the woman’s face the while.

“So that was it!” she said, leaning back in the low fireside chair she had taken when Bertham wheeled it forwards. Her musing eyes were fixed upon the red coals glowing in the old-world grate of polished steel. Perhaps the vivid face with the black eyes burning under their level brows rose up before her; and it might have been that she heard Dunoisse’s voice saying, through the purring of the cat upon the hearthrug and the subdued noises of the street:

“_May the hour that sees me spend a sou of that accursed money be an hour of shame for me, and bitterness and humiliation! And should ever a day draw near that is to see me trick myself in dignities and honors stolen by a charlatan’s device and assume a power to which I have no more moral right than the meanest peasant of the State it rules--before its dawning I pray that I may die! and that those who come seeking a clod of mud to throw in the face of a Catholic State may find it lying in a coffin!_”

XIX

She must have remembered the words, for she shivered a little, and when Bertham asked her: “Of what are you thinking?” she answered:

“Of young Mr. Dunoisse, and the struggle that is before him. He is courageous.... He means so well.... He is so earnest and sincere and high-minded and generous.... But one cannot forget that he has not been tried, or that fiercer tests of his determination and endurance will come as the years unfold, and----”

“He will--supposing him a man of flesh and blood like other men!” said Bertham--“find his resolution--if it be one?--put, very shortly, very thoroughly to the proof. For--the Berlin papers of last Wednesday deal voluminously with the subject, and the Paris papers of a later date have even condescended to dwell upon it at some length--his grandfather, the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, who practically has been dead for years, is at last dead enough for burying; and the question of Succession having cropped up, it may occur to the Catholic subjects of the Principality that they would prefer a Catholic Prince--even with a bar-sinister, badly erased, upon his ’scutcheon--to being governed by a Lutheran Regent. And that is all I know at present.”

“It is a curious, almost a romantic story,” she said, with her grave eyes upon the glowing fire, and a long, fine, slender hand propping her cheek, “that provokes one to wonder how it will end?”

“It will end, dear Ada,” smiled Bertham, “in this young fellow’s putting his Quixotic scruples in his pocket, taking the goods the gods have sent him--with the Hereditary diadem, when it is offered on a cushion!--marrying some blonde Princess-cousin, with the requisite number of armorial quarterings; and providing,--in the shortest possible time, the largest possible number of legitimate heirs to the throne. I lay no claim to the prophetic gift; but I do possess some knowledge of my fellow-men. And--if your prejudice against gaming does not preclude a bet, I will wager you a pair of gloves, or half a dozen pairs, against the daguerreotype of you that Mary and I are always begging for and never get;--that M. Dunoisse’s scruples and objections will be overcome in the long-run, and that the whole thing will end as I have prophesied.”

She listened with a little fold between her eyebrows, and her thoughtful eyes upon the speaker’s face.

“I fear you may be right. But I shall be glad if you prove wrong, Bertham. One thinks how bravely he has borne the pinch of poverty, and the dearth of the pleasantnesses and luxuries that mean so much to young men of his age----”

“‘Of his age?’.... You talk as though you were a sere and withered spinster, separated from the world of young men and young women by a veritable gulf of years!” cried Bertham, vexed.

* * * * *

She did not hear. She was looking at the fire, leaning forwards in her low chair with her beautiful head pensively bent, and her slender strong hands clasped about the knee that was a little lifted by the resting of one fine arched foot--as beautiful in its stocking of Quakerish gray and its plain, unbuckled leather slipper as though it had been covered with silk, and shod with embroidered kid or velvet--upon the high steel fender.

“One would like to be near him sometimes unseen--in one of those moments of temptation that will come to him--temptations to be false to his vow, and take the price of dishonor, for the devil will fight hard, Bertham, for that man’s soul! Just to be able to give a pull here, or a push in that direction, according as circumstances seek to mold or sway him, to say ‘_Do this!_’ or ‘_Do not do that!_’ at the crucial moment, would be worth while!...”

“‘Faith, my dear Ada,” Bertham said lightly, “the _rôle_ of guardian angel is one you were cut out for, and suits you very well. But be content, one begs of you, to play it nearer home!... I know a worthy young man, at present in a situation in a large business-house at Westminster, who would very much benefit by a push here and a pull there from a hand invisible or visible--visible preferred! And to be told ‘Do this!’ or ‘Don’t do that!’ in a moment of doubt or at a crisis of indecision, would spare the Member for West Wealdshire a great many sleepless nights.”

They laughed together; then she said, with the rose-flush fading out of her pale cheeks and the light of merriment in her blue-gray eyes subdued again to clear soft radiance:

“I do not like those sleepless nights. Can nothing be done for them?”

“They are my only chance,” he answered, “of gaining any acquaintance with the works of modern novelists.”

“You do not take Sir Walter Scott, or Mr. Thackeray, or Mr. Dickens, or the author of _Jane Eyre_, as sleeping-draughts?”

“No,” returned Bertham, “for the credit of my good taste. But there are others whose works Cleopatra might have called for instead of mandragora. As regards the newspapers, if it be not exactly agreeable or encouraging to know exactly how far Misrepresentation can go without being absolute Mendacity--it is salutary and wholesome, I suppose, to be told when one has fallen short of winning even appreciation for one’s honest endeavor to do one’s duty--or what one conceives to be one’s duty--tolerably well?”

He rose, pushing his chair aside, and took a turn in the room that carried him to the window.

“One has made mistakes,” he said, keeping his face turned from her soft kind look; “but so have other fellows, without being pilloried and pelted for them! And two years back, when the office of Secretary At War seemed to have been created for the purpose of affording His Grace the Secretary For War and other high officials, unlimited opportunities of pulling down what the first-named had built up, and of building up what he, with hopes of doing good, had pulled down, the pelting bruised. But--Jove! if that part of my life were mine to live all over again, with Experience added to my youthful enthusiasms, I might reasonably hope to achieve much! Happy you”--he came and stood beside her chair, looking down at the calm profile and plainly-parted, faintly-rippling brown hair with a certain wistfulness--“most happy are you, dear Ada, who have so nobly fulfilled the high promise of your girlhood, and have no need to join in useless regrets with me!”

She smiled, and lifted her warm, womanly hand to him, and said, as he enclosed it for a second in his own:

“Wrong leads and false ideals are the lot of all of us. And you were of so much use in your high office, Robert, and wielded your power so much for others’ good; you strive so chivalrously now, in thankless, unpopular causes; you make your duty so paramount above your ambition in all things,--that I am tempted to paraphrase your words to me, and tell you that you have gloriously contradicted the promise of your Eton boyhood, when everything that was not Football, or Boating, or Cricket, was ‘bad form.’”

* * * * *

“To my cousin de Moulny’s annoyance and disgust unspeakable,” he returned, with a lighter tone and a lighter look, though he had glowed and kindled at the praise from her. “I did indulge--at those periods when he was staying at Wraye Abbey--in a good deal of that sort of bosh. But--quite wrongly, I dare say!--he seemed to me a high-falutin’, pompous young French donkey; and it became a point of importance not to lose an opportunity of taking him down. By the way, I heard from him quite lately. He gave up the idea of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood after some clash or collision with the Rules of the Fathers Directors, and is now an Under-Secretary at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.”

“He should have a notable career before him!” she commented.

“The Legitimist Party, at this present juncture, possess not one featherweight in the scale of popularity or influence. France is on the eve,” said Bertham, “or so it seems to me, of shedding her skin, and whether the new one will be of one color or of Three, White it will not be; I’ll bet my hat on that! So possibly it may be fortunate for de Moulny that the harness he pulls in has an Imperial Crown upon it. I need hardly say a pretty hand is upon the reins.”

Her laugh made soft music in the cosy, homely parlor, and amusement danced on her sweet firelit eyes....

“Whose is the hand?”

“It appertains, physically, to a certain Comtesse de Roux, and legally to a purple-haired, fiercely-whiskered, fiery-featured Colonel Comte de Roux--by whose original creation Comte is a little uncertain--but a brave and distinguished officer, commanding the 999th of the Line.”

She said, with a memory stirring in her face:

“That is the regiment--according to his old governess, for he did not tell me--to which M. Hector Dunoisse is attached.”

Bertham might not have heard. He said:

“I regret not having met Madame de Roux. One would like to see de Moulny’s reigning goddess.”

“She is most beautiful in person and countenance. Your term of ‘goddess’ is not inappropriate. She walks as though on clouds.”

Her ungrudging admiration of another woman’s beauty was a trait in her that always pleased him.

“Where did you meet?”

“I saw her in Paris a twelvemonth back, on the steps that lead to the vestibule of the Théâtre Française, one night when Rachel was to play in ‘Phédre.’”

“I thought you had forsworn all public entertainments, theaters included?”

“If I had I should not have endangered my oath by seeing Madame de Roux pass from her carriage and walk up the steps leading to the vestibule.”

“You were not in the streets of Paris alone, and on foot, at night?”

She answered simply, looking directly at him:

“I was in the Paris streets that evening, on foot, certainly, but not alone. Sister Saint Bernard was with me.”

“Who is Sister Saint Bernard?”