Part 50
“Without spies, informers, interpreters, and agents of all grades, an Invading Army is blindfold and helpless. Thus, the assistance of pachas, boyards, consuls, attachés, secretaries, postmasters, innkeepers, will be ours, having been secured on liberal terms. Every Commissariat-clerk, commercial traveler and correspondent who could be bought to serve my purpose has found in me a ready purchaser. And every Turk or Tartar has made oath upon the beard of the Prophet--every Jew is sworn upon the Ark of the Tabernacle--every Bulgarian is pledged upon the Blessed Sacrament--not to supply the English with wood for gabions or shelters, with provisions, grain, fodder, horses, wagons or carts. Wherefore, if they need these things, they must draw supplies from Great Britain, or from Italy. And, failing these sources----”
The speaker shrugged again, and said with a sardonic affectation of humility:
“For the unworthy successor of my glorious uncle, it seems to me that I have hit upon a very good idea!”
He smiled upon them, saying it, and between that swelling sense of achievement, and his inward laughter at having thus duped and distanced those who thought they swayed and guided him, he seemed to increase in stature and gain in dignity. Even de Morny was momentarily bankrupt of a gibe to throw at him. De Fleury could only gape and goggle at him. St. Arnaud said, in a voice broken by surprise and admiration:
“My master--my Emperor, you are greater than Napoleon the Great!”
Persigny went over and knelt down upon the carpet before him. He bent over and kissed one of the little diamond-buckled pumps fervently, as a Dervish might have kissed the Holy Stone of Mecca. He said, in a voice that shook and wobbled:
“I say that you are neither my master or my Emperor. From this moment you are my god!”
“Absurd!” said Sire my Friend. But he smiled as Nero might have smiled upon Tigellinus, and said, still smiling:
“Wait--wait! I have not told everything! You have yet to look at the second chart!”
He laid it down upon the first, which it exactly resembled, save that the numbered rounds and squares indicating the depots were missing, and that along the conjectural route of the Army of Invasion certain areas were staked off with green or blue or vermilion dots, and labeled “Malarious,” or “Insalubrious,” or “Salubrious,” as the case might be, and others “Pestilential,” in a tremulous, uncertain handwriting that told its story to at least one pair of eyes there. Looking up with a vexatious expression of cynical intelligence on his well-bred, rakish countenance, said de Morny:
“And your man, your administrative, polyglot genius who planned and carried out”--he tapped the first chart with a polished finger-nail--“this masterpiece of organization, and later made this survey of Death’s garden--what has become of Dunoisse?” He added: “For this is Dunoisse’s handwriting--and two years ago he went East upon your business, and has not since been heard of. Did he die out there in Death’s garden? or--as the possessor of an inconvenient amount of secret information--have you quodded him in some snug dungeon at the Fortress of Vincennes, or the Prison of Mazas? Or have you had him shot, or scragged him, before putting him to bed in quicklime blankets? _Kif--kif--burrico!_--a quietus, either way!”
Horribly meaningful as the words were, the gesture accompanying them was even more significant. It brought a dull, scorched flush into the pasty cheeks of Sire my Friend. But he maintained his boasted imperturbability, and answered, with his quiet smile of menace:
“It pleases you to be offensive. Pursue your vein if you imagine it will serve you--I am indifferent to your opinion of me! As for General Dunoisse--who, as you rightly guess, acted as my instrument in carrying out these comprehensive arrangements for Commissariat and Transport--who completed this sanitary survey of the debatable ground--that unhappy officer expired of fever in the swamps of the Dobrudja, some months ago. These charts were brought me by his confidential secretary--one Michaëlis Giusko--to whom the dying man entrusted them.” He added, in answer to de Morny’s smile: “Your perspicuity is not at fault.... Lest his silence and discretion should fail us at this crucial moment--M. Giusko is in safe keeping--where, there is no need to say!... As for this second chart of the Unseen Dangers, by following its guidance our Army will not encamp within insalubrious or pestilential areas. While our Allies--unless they have taken similar precautions--are likely more or less to suffer!” He ended meditatively, stroking his imperial:
“We share with them the Borgian apple--we take the half that is not poisoned. The whole thing is simple. It is not we who die!”
He opened his eyes widely and looked upon his followers. It seemed to them that through those blazing windows they saw down into Hell. As he said again how simple the thing was, a rattling oath of the canteen and the barrack-room escaped from de Fleury, that caused the green shades of the table-lamps to shiver in their gilded sockets. Persigny’s teeth were chattering, though the April night was almost sultry. De Morny broke out peevishly as he wiped his clammy face:
“_Zut!_--there is no doubt you have got them in the treacle! But why did your Majesty not wait to tell us this until Lord Dalgan and the Duke had left for Marseilles? I am sick in my stomach with funk, absolutely!--at the thought of doing the civil to them and their men to-night!”
“Be uncivil, then,” advised his Imperial master. “Between your compliments and your insults there is so subtle a distinction that neither the Duke or Dalgan will be the wiser, you may be sure!”
St. Arnaud roared at this mordant witticism. De Morny was about to launch a return-shaft, when there came a gentle, significant knocking--not upon the door through which they had previously passed, but another, communicating with the outer gallery.
“Enter!” commanded Sire my Friend, for the knocker had given the prescribed number of taps that heralded his Private Military Secretary.
And the door opened, and there entered, gently closing it behind him, the very man who had died in the marshes of the Dobrudja months before.
LXXXII
He was so strangely altered, aged, bleached and wasted, that for some moments Sire my Friend and the other owners of the curled and made-up heads that had pivoted round upon his entrance regarded him in the silence that is born of dismay. The color of old wax, or of a corpse some days dead, an atmosphere of such chilly isolation surrounded this pale spectral figure, that even de Moray, that cool smiling skeptic, knew the shudder of superstitious terror, and felt his thin hair stiffen on his scalp. A worn and shabby Staff uniform of the date of the Presidency hung in folds upon the intruder’s lean and stooping body. His black eyes burned in caves hollowed by protracted mental labors and immense physical exertions. His black hair, long uncut, and mingled with streaks and patches of white, hung in tangled elf-locks to his tarnished epaulets, and drooped in a heavy matted plume upon his brow. To the gaunt hollows beneath his haunted eyes he was raggedly bearded with this piebald mixture. And as he stood before them, intermittent gusts of fever seized and shook him, until his teeth chattered audibly, and his bones seemed to rattle in his baggy, withered skin. As, in one of these gusts, he coughed, and pressed to his parched lips a yellowed cambric handkerchief that was presently bloodstained, de Fleury--reassured by this incontestable proof of mortality--took courage and called him by his name:
“Dunoisse!”
“Dunoisse!... A thousand welcomes, _mon cher_ General!” Sire my Friend, instantly assuming his urbane and benignant air, stepped towards the shabby scarecrow with graciously extended hand. But the scarecrow raised its own, and waved Imperial Majesty back with a gesture so expressive of warning, if not of menace, that the action sent a shudder through its witnesses. Again they doubted if this were not some ghostly visitant from the world that is beyond the grave.... And again the hacking, tearing cough came to convince them that this was no spirit, but merely a dying man.
Said Sire my Friend, after that slight pause of consternation:
“My good Dunoisse, you have dropped on us--literally from the heavens. As a fact, we had heard on excellent authority that you were--ill--and that the pleasure of welcoming you must be--indefinitely deferred. Upon this account excuse what may strike you as lack of cordiality in our greeting!” He added, and his growing confidence permitted an outcrop of anger upon the smooth polish of his accents. “And explain to us--the rules denying unknown officers access to the Emperor’s private apartments being even more stringent than those which protected the President from such intrusion--how you gained admittance here?”
For all answer, the shape he spoke to lifted its left hand, and showed, hanging loosely on a wasted finger, a signet ring. Sire my Friend, recognizing the token conferring upon his Equerry General, Private Secretary, and Military Secretaries, access to his person at all hours, shrugged his chagrin; and tapped his daintily-shod foot impatiently upon the floor.
“Of course! Naturally! Pardon my forgetfulness!” he said urbanely. “I myself bestowed that Open Sesame upon you, when your skill, and intelligence, and ability prompted me to promote you to a confidential post upon my Staff. And later--when my reliance in your discretion and fidelity led me to place in your most able hands the task which you have so superbly completed--you took the ring with you when you left Paris for the East.” He added, discerning that the black eyes burning in their shadowy caves glanced at the faces of his merry men with doubtfulness:
“Have no fear! These trusted friends who shared with me the secret of the intended _coup d’État_ participate in knowledge of this later--measure of diplomacy.... You have arrived at the very moment of disclosure.... Therefore speak out quite freely, my very good Dunoisse!...”
Dunoisse opened his cracked lips, and said, in a voice so faint and hollow that it might have answered from the sepulcher of Lazarus when the Voice bade the dead come forth:
“I will speak out freely. To do so is my right. None can dispute it.”
He waited, gathering strength, clenching his fleshless hands, breathing painfully; and a glistening upon his sunken parchment temples and the burning patches of red upon his hollow cheeks betrayed the terrible emotions that rent and tore the wasted body that housed a suffering soul.
“I have spread your nets,” he said, in the voice that had lost its clear, sharp ring, and was feeble, and flat, and broken. “From the Balkans to the Pruth I have set your springes--dug your pitfalls--sharpened your hidden stakes. I have put it in your power to precipitate a crisis. To meet events and grapple Fate I used all the strength and all the skill I had.”
He drew a shaken breath and went on:
“I have subsidized scores of men into this service--no man knowing his neighbor for a fellow-conspirator--every man secretly bound by the oath that is most sacred in his sight. Turks, Greeks, Tartars, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Wallachs--all have been pledged not to give aid to Russia, or England the Ally of Russia, in the great War that was presently to be waged with France and the Ottoman Empire--over the Debatable Ground....”
A rush of fever dyed his sallowness to dusky crimson. The heat that radiated from his burning body struck upon the bodies of the other men.
“I served you,” he said, fixing his sunken, glittering eyes upon the face of Imperial Majesty, “to the very gates of Death. Believing myself to be dying, I placed--in the hands of two men who had sought me out and found me--the original charts that proved my task completed, and the tracings of those charts. One, at least, of my messengers could not fail to reach you----”
De Morny said, pointing to the writing-table, where the squares of shiny tracing-paper, covered with spidery diagrams and dotted lines in red and blue and green and vari-colored inks, lay in the yellow radiance cast by the green-shaded lamp:
“There are the proofs that one of your messengers did reach his destination. We had been looking at those marvelous charts the moment before you came in.”
De Morny, Duke and Peer of France, might have been a mouse squeaking in a corner or one of the love-birds and wax-bills--dainty feathered creatures for which Imperial Majesty possessed an amiable _penchant_--twittering in its gilded window-cage. For Dunoisse neither saw nor heard him, but folded his thin arms upon his hollow breast, and spoke with his haggard eyes on the face of Sire my Friend.
“I came back to civilization to learn the truth of you. I was not the keeper of your secret, the agent of your power, set to pit craft against craft and insure victory by wise precaution!--I was your dupe, your accomplice, and your tool. Judas! Oh, Judas!” said Dunoisse, in a dry, fierce rustling whisper that was like the sirocco passing through a field of withered maize-stalks. “How is it that I believed you--knowing you besmeared with blood, and rotten to the soul with deceits and falsehoods? How should _I_ not be among the number of those you have flattered and swindled and betrayed?”
The silence of sickening consternation was on each of those who heard him. Their crests of false curls drooped; the paint faded from their faces under the lashing hail of his words. They were crimson or leaden or sea-green according to their various temperaments--the complexion of Sire my Friend having undergone this last and most unbecoming change. And Dunoisse went on speaking, almost without a gesture, as a man whose bodily weakness compelled economy of breath and action.
“I was to have had a great reward of you for my services. One million one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, to be definite! Keep your stolen money! Could I buy back self-respect with the price of blood? As for you, you have won your Empire--have brought about the War you schemed and plotted for; you will take the field with Turkey and your Ally of England, shoulder to shoulder--side by side!... Ah!--you read Machiavelli at the Fortress of Ham to good purpose!... You grew more than violets upon the ramparts, Monseigneur! You matured plans for revenge.... And you will have your honeyed vengeance,” said Dunoisse, in that distinct, rasping whisper. “And gall will mingle with the sweetness as you suck it. For those old associates of yours--those men of the Reform and Carlton Clubs of London--will say of you: ‘By God!--this Emperor of France is a damned scoundrel!’ And, by God!--they will be right!”
The sentence, spoken in English, cut like a tandem-whip. As it hissed through the stagnant, perfumed, tobacco-laden atmosphere of the room, the speaker drew his sword. Sire my Friend recoiled and cried out at the sharp hiss of the steel, and de Fleury, brave as a bulldog, sprang before his master instantly. But Dunoisse only balanced the weapon a moment with the deftness of a master of fence, ere, with an effort that taxed his feebleness to the utmost, he snapped the tarnished steel across his thin knee, and said, as he threw the pieces down clattering at the dainty buckled feet of Imperial Majesty:
“My military oath of allegiance was to the President, not to the Emperor. I will serve you no longer, be that understood! And--though the work I have done has been fatally well done!--in so far as it be possible, I will unmesh the net I have woven.... Therefore be warned, Monseigneur!”
With this, as a man might shake off from his hand some venomous insect, he dropped the loosely-fitting signet ring upon the carpet, ground it with a sudden, savage impulse underneath his heel, and went out, leaving them staring and short of breath.
A moment later, Sire my Friend, whose complexion of sea-green had suffered change to a congested purple, staggered and clutched at nothing, and fell down frothing in an epileptic fit.
By the advice of Persigny--who had seen him before in that pitiable condition--they moved the furniture away from his vicinity, and left his devil to use him at its will. And presently he came to, staring and shuddering, with a bitten glove between his teeth; and was very feeble and exhausted, and full of fears lest the Empress had seen him thus afflicted. But by-and-by, when reassured, and restored, and renovated, he was able to interview the Chief of his Secret Police, and give orders for an arrest....
He was peculiarly benevolent, urbane and smiling, an hour later, when, to the united strains of “God Save the Queen” and “_Partant Pour La Syrie_,” he entered the fairyland of blue-and-white striped awnings, blue carpets, gold-tasseled hangings of pink satin, and elfin grottos of green gauze, full of palms and hot-house roses, illuminated with pink, blue and yellow Chinese lights. Leading the beautiful Empress--who rested her gloved hand on the happy arm of the Duke of Bambridge--followed by the French and British Commanders-in-Chief, with their Staffs, his brothers and his uncle, he looked--or might have with the addition of a few more inches--every inch an Emperor.
And not only an Emperor, said the Imperial Press Organs--a philanthropic lover of mankind, who--supported by Great Britain, the nursing-mother of infant nations--was about to carry out a war in the cause of Freedom, Justice, and the Rights of Man against Irresponsible Despotism.
Amidst the general joyousness, the depression of de Morny--that usually light-hearted cynic--was curiously apparent. Lord Dalgan noticed this, and commented upon it in his exquisite, polished French:
“By my faith, Monseigneur!” returned de Morny, in the English language, “I cannot deny it, I am confoundedly hipped to-night! Absolutely, I am like the Princess in the Suabian fairy legend--there is a rose-leaf under my twenty-ninth feather-bed. Why? I am envious--absolutely envious! I have seen a poor man throw away one million one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs for the privilege of enjoying a luxury that I, who am a rich man, cannot afford.”
“Really! And what is that costly form of indulgence?” asked my Lord.
De Morny answered, with a curious smile on that well-bred, rakish face of his:
“The luxury of telling the truth!”
* * * * *
He could not afford it, though he would have liked it.... It was not yet convenient to break with Sire my Friend....
* * * * *
And so the Monster Ball spun and whirled itself out, dancing becoming public after the departure of the Imperial Party and their guests. At three in the morning when even young and handsome faces looked fagged, and old ones witchlike and ghastly; when the real flowers were faded, and the imitation ones dusty and limp; when the elfin grottos were revealed as garish shams which no respectable fairy would have dreamed of being seen in--when the innumerable colored lanterns hung from trees and twinkling amongst shrubberies looked pale and mean and sickly in the light of coming day; a prison-van, bolted on a railway-truck--having a carriage containing an Imperial aide-de-camp and two Commissaries of Police in front of it, and another full of gendarmerie behind it--was being whirled by a special engine into the Northern Department of the Somme.
At the station where the van was unbolted from the railway-truck an escort of Lancers waited; also a one-horse brougham, an open brake, drawn by a pair; and a couple of spare horses. These being harnessed to the van, the aide, after exchanging a sentence or two with the commander of the cavalry escort, stepped into the brougham, followed by the police-officers, who modestly took the front seat. Then at a curt word of command the party put itself in motion, and clattered and clinked and rolled away.
And presently the prison-van, with its wheeled and mounted guardians, passed--with a challenge from a sentry and the giving of a countersign at each--over two drawbridges, and clattered and rolled--the prisoner judged by the damp chill and the hollow echo--under a heavy archway of stone. And then, with the grinding of heavy iron wards in locks, and screaming of solid iron bolts in stony groovings, the van came to a halt; the steps were banged down, the door was opened; and the yawning jailers who had traveled with the prisoner unlocked his narrow cell.
Dunoisse was invited to get out. He moved his cramped limbs with difficulty, and descended the iron steps in the gay sunshine of an April morning, which painted long blue shadows on a lofty wall centered by a massive gateway with a square watch-tower, across the stones of a flagged courtyard.
Two huge round towers flanked the south and west angles of the courtyard. A block of buildings was upon his right hand that looked like a Barracks. Another, smaller, on his left, was probably the dwelling of the Commandant. A gray-haired, stout man in the undress uniform of a field-officer of the Line came out of the house, saluted the Imperial aide, and returned the salute of the officer of the escort. He had a blue paper in his hand.
He said, addressing the prisoner after a brief colloquy with the Imperial Staff officer:
“You will be confined here during the pleasure of the Emperor.”
Dunoisse knew that meant for life. He lifted his haggard eyes as he asked the question:
“Where am I?”
The answer came:
“You are in the Fortress of Ham.”
LXXXIII
“CAMP NEAR VARNA,
“_June_.
“MY DEAREST MOTHER,
“We arrived Here all Safe, and are Incampt with the Division on a Scrubby Plane by a Lake full of Leaches about 2 milse inland of Varna, Which is the Beastliest Town you ever Saw. It is Full of English, French, Turks, Bulgarians, Jews, Infadels, and Herraticks. Every now and Then a Fire brakes out which Marshal St. Arnod the French Commander-in-Chief says is Dew to insendiary Greekse. Yesterday it Was the House next our Powder Maggazine, but luckily the Wind Changed, and we Lost neerly all our Stores of Barly, Biskits, Tea, Suggar, Coffy, Flower and so on. N.B.--How does He know it was insendiary Greekse?
“Tell my Father that the Army is short of Otse and Forridge. Though we have Not quite 4,000 Beests of Transport to move an Army of 27,000 Men!!! We Have Hardly Annything to Give them, And the Noise they make is something Friteful, and every day Lotts of them die. The Cavalry Horses are Fed at preasent, that is all One can Say. I am quite Well, so you must not be Fritened when you Read in the Paperse that Colera has broken out among the Troops.”
Young Morty Jowell, seated on the end of the tent-cot before his folding trestle-table, laid down the pen at this point, and dispiritedly rubbed his nose. Looking from where he sat, he could see under the lifted canvas of the hospital-marquees the rigid shapes of smitten soldiers lying in rows on the cut rushes that covered the bare ground.... For Spring and Summer had conspired with Sire my Friend to the undoing of his Allies of England. Spring had spread beds for the soldiers of the deep wet moss, starred with purple iris and the blue bead hyacinth. Summer had woven her nets of wild sweet roses, filled her deep vineyards with deadly bait of grapes, peaches, and figs. The bees had made for them of the yellow azalea-blossoms, the fragrant, poisonous green honey that breeds fever and delirium. They had eaten of this, and of the tempting fruit, and sickened; and Pestilence had risen up and breathed her blue miasma upon them, and gripped them in her iron cramps, and they had died. The dead were being buried as Morty wrote on: