Part 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He made her promise it, and left her wondering.

XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Vive le Prince Impérial!_"

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

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

XIX

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

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

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

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

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