Part 25

He got up, pocketing his handkerchief, came over to her and stood beside her, in the upright attitude which called attention to the disproportion between his huge torso and his too-short legs. He held his furred cap upon his hip with one hand, and with the other stroked his waved wedge-beard. The rasping sound made by his heavily-ringed fingers as they passed through the thick, crisp hairs irritated her to anguish. Yet not so long ago it had thrilled her to sensuous ecstasy.

"I played the girl--and I have lost!" Almost against her will a cry broke from her. "My God! what things he said to me! My God! what humiliations we women endure for men!"

"I had imagined, my Adelaide," said he of the Assyrian hair and profile, showing in a smile a double row of teeth so perfect that they struck the imagination as being carved out of two solid curves of ivory--"that you were playing for your own advantage--even when you played my game. Did M. le Comte mention me at any point of the interview?"

She started at the unexpected question. Her voice shook a little in the reply.

"He said that he had heard--that M. de Straz had lately visited Berlin. That his agents would tell him. Of course!"

"He said nothing of--a flying visit of mine to Sigmaringen?"

She answered hastily:

"I think not. No! I am quite certain he did not."

"No?"

Straz sniffed and whipped out his handkerchief, grumbling:

"Yet the purport of my mission to that South German crow's-nest was known to him--here in Berlin--I can prove it!--by nightfall of the day I interviewed the Prince." He added, trumpeting in his handkerchief, "Of course, M. Bismarck has spies everywhere. But all the same it was quick work!"

Her face was immovable. No guilty flush stained its smooth ivory surface. Only the lines about her scarlet mouth sharpened, that was all.

Straz went on, peevishly, strolling to the fireplace, and leaning an elbow on the corner of the mantelshelf.

"I suppose they call that princely hospitality--to send a man who has traveled night and day, and is decanted out of a crazy railway-station droschke at the door of their confounded Stammschloss at five o'clock in the morning--to an inn!"

She said in a velvet tone of amorous insinuation, and with a glance of sleepy fire:

"To an inn where Love lay waiting!..."

"Truly," he admitted, "but how were they to know that you were there? What possible connection could have been imagined between two chance travelers--I--arriving from Paris--you coming from Berlin? Besides--to send me to a summer tavern on the banks of the Danube!--when they have two hundred bedrooms at the Schloss! If that is princely hospitality, I tell you that I spit upon it! I grind it under the heel of my boot!"

Her nostrils dilated with disgust as he demonstrated by spitting on the hearthrug. She said, meeting his angry black stare with eyes that were of the color of tawny wine:

"The Prince cannot have regretted his omission to accommodate you with an apartment, when the Emperor's message was made known to him!"

He demanded:

"Am I a hired bravo? _Pardieu_! your words suggest it. Were either of the old man's sons in danger personally, from me? Not at all! I but repeated a lesson--gave a warning as it had been given.... But I understand--you have been chagrined by the nature of your reception from the Federal Chancellor!"

She returned, now flushed and breathing deeply:

"It is true. I suffocate at the recollection. Give me time to breathe!"

She rose. Straz said, going over to her, taking both her hands, kissing them and replacing her in her chair:

"Compose yourself. Let me understand the attitude M. le Ministre is taking. I need not remind you that not until I had learned from you that, through the lamented Count Valverden, you were sufficiently acquainted with M. de Bismarck to obtain an interview, did I suggest that you should seek one. Well, you did, and it has taken place. You told him of the little episode I witnessed in January--on the day of the funeral of Victor Noir at Neuilly. Monseigneur the Prince Imperial was riding with his governor and escort--the Avenue of the Champs Elysées was blocked by troops. A charming girl threw M. Lulu a bunch of violets--made a little scene of loyalty and enthusiasm in contrast with the unamiable attitude of the crowd assembled. An equerry dismounted and gave the flowers to Monseigneur. He carried them with him as he galloped toward the Bois de Boulogne. Nothing of importance in that, perhaps, had he not afterward sent for the equerry who had picked up the flowers, and said to him, blushing, '_Pray tell me who was she?_' So skilled a master of phrases as M. de Bismarck could hardly have undervalued the question from the heir to an Empire, taken in combination with the blush. Or discounted the importance of the fact that, later, when the equerry brought him the information that the charming unknown was the daughter and only child of a certain gallant Colonel commanding the 777th Regiment of Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard--at that moment quartered at Versailles,--Monseigneur said, with another blush as ingenuous as the first, 'I am glad she is the daughter of so brave a soldier! Possibly I may meet her one of these days.' Being told that her baptismal name was 'Juliette' he blushed once more, and wrote it down,--together with Mademoiselle's surname and address,--in a little memorandum-book he habitually carries.... And there, my exquisite Adelaide--if your narrative style did credit to my teaching, the interest of M. de Bismarck should have been engaged."

She lowered her chin and drooped her somber eyelids, and said with curling lips:

"It was. He took out his watch, and told me: 'I can hear you for three minutes longer! Has the Prince Imperial--with the disinterested assistance of those about him, altered that possibility into a certainty?' I explained to him then that nothing further had come of the _rencontre_,--though measures had been taken to preserve Monseigneur's interest from dying for lack of excitement, bouquets of violets being sent to him at regular intervals, with a slip of paper attached to the stems, upon which had been written in an unformed, girlish hand--'_From one who prays for the Hope of France!_'

"And then?..."

"Then M. de Bismarck spoke, keeping his thumb all the time on the watch-dial: 'So! The girl plays the part of an ingenue for the present! Will she keep these airs of candor and innocence when she has got her claws on that poor stripling? And do you suggest that the Prussian Secret Service should supply her with funds for the carrying out of her design, whatever it may be? Are we to lay our heads together, like the Brethren in the libretto of Mehul's opera "Joseph," and sing in chorus: _This is the heir. Come, let us kill him!_'"

"Even Beelzebub," said Straz, "can quote from Scripture when it suits him. I suppose you were annoyed, and showed it--which was an error of judgment on your part!"

"I rose up," said she, and suited the action to the word, "with indignation, assuring M. de Bismarck that his suspicions were unjust. That the young girl mentioned was of ancient family and irreproachable morals, convent-bred and highly educated. And that I, myself, being her nearest living relative of her own sex, was able to vouch for the fact. I added that the interest displayed in her by Monseigneur the Prince--who until that moment had never been known to look at a woman--led me to conceive that by aid of a few deft hints, a little discreet encouragement--another distant glimpse--a meeting accidentally brought about in some retired spot favorable to the revival of first impressions, an influence might be brought to bear upon the Imperial boy which might develop his mind and mold his character. Somehow in my agitation the name of Juliette de Bayard escaped me. 'De Bayard,' exclaimed M. de Bismarck. 'So! You are her mother!' Great Heaven!--the intolerable tone in which he uttered the words! Only the most abandoned of her sex could have supported the insulting irony of the look accompanying them. Choking, I took my leave.... He accompanied me to the staircase, with a false appearance of courtesy. As I turned to descend, he hurled the last insult of all! Nicolas, do not ask me to repeat the sentences!--and yet, I must have them written in another memory.... He twitted me with my nationality before his secretary and servants. He likened me to a mythological character with an unpronounceable name.... He said only a modern mother would be infamous enough to devote her only daughter to Venus Something-Or-Other.... Next to my husband, I detest that man!"

Straz had been pulling at his moist red underlip as she raved out her story in a frenzy of rage and resentment, intensified by the necessity of speaking in a lowered tone. Now he dragged the feature out as though it had been made of india-rubber, let it snap back, and said, shrugging his bull's shoulders and getting up:

"You are a woman and he is--Bismarck! He does not for the moment want the wares you desire to sell him. It is unlike him--the diplomat who could encourage M. Benedetti to lay before him the Emperor's _projet de traité_ in writing--and lock it away for use at a future opportunity--not to be willing to secure an advantage--placed before him with clearness and skill--in the newly awakened fancy of a schoolboy who, if he lives, will be an Emperor--for a charming and innocent young girl!" He pronounced these words as though they were smeared with something sweet and luscious, licking his lips gently, and rolling his dead black eyes in sensual enjoyment. "As regards your husband, he has certainly not replied to the letter of your solicitors, but why do you hate the unlucky man?"

"Do you ask?" Adelaide demanded, with glittering eyes and heaving bosom. "Did he not refuse to divorce me? Should I not have legally borne the title of Baroness von Valverden if his sentimental prejudices had not blocked the way?"

Straz pulled his waved beard, and said, delicately separating a strand of it from the rest, and keeping it between his thick white fingers:

"Sentimental, why sentimental? Do you not even give him credit for sufficient spirit to resent being made ridiculous? The desire to be revenged--you will not even allow him that?"

She bit her scarlet underlip and answered, breathing quickly:

"He was too good, too high-minded--too chivalrous--oh! 'tis ridiculous, I admit!" for Straz commenced to titter silently, screwing up the corners of his eyes and shaking his shoulders, as he sat with his thick, short arms folded on his chest. "An idea to make you hug yourself as you are doing. But true, nevertheless! He would have said--at this distance of time I can still hear him preaching: '_I will avenge the injury to my honor when I am confronted with my enemy. I will not revenge myself upon the woman who deserted me for him!_'"

The words came, not in her own voice. Straz left off sniggering. He said to himself, considering her through narrowed lids:

"Those were De Bayard's actual words. I wonder, since she has neither seen nor heard from him since she left him, how it is she knew that they were spoken? Some obliging mutual friend may have repeated them. Or she read them in some letter of his, written to Count Valverden. That is quite possible. But the question is, whether she would detest him so bitterly if her passion for him were absolutely extinguished. She is even jealous when one speaks of their daughter, whom he worships.... I will play her on this string--it may be useful, who knows?"

Aloud he said:

"Detest your husband, dear friend, if it affords you entertainment. Probably he deserves it, though women I have met who knew him vowed him _un crème d'homme_, worthy of the name he bears." He smiled in his beard, hearing her foot tap upon the shining parquet, and went on. "Men have praised his gallantry and his disinterestedness----"

"'Disinterestedness!'" she mocked. "Truly--to the point of fanaticism he is disinterested. Have we not to thank that characteristic for the ruin of our plans?"

Said Straz:

"A little more subtlety upon the part of your solicitors, and you might have found M. le Colonel less obstinately inclined to discourage the idea of a reconciliation. To have entrusted a portrait to the hands of the lawyers would have been an excellent move. Once convinced that the thirteen or fourteen years that have elapsed since you--parted--have increased rather than diminished the beauty that once he worshiped--and I fancy De Bayard would have accepted your terms!"

He sniggered, and waited as the violet shadows about her brilliant eyes deepened, and she breathed more quickly. Then he went on:

"They were generous--I allude to the conditions. Ninety men out of a hundred would have accepted them. For what has De Bayard to condone that others have not winked at? You were a mere girl, weary of separation from a husband who doubtless consoled himself after his own fashion, for his detention in the Crimea. Bored to desperation--condemned to spend your days in the care of a child, and in listening to the imbecile grumblings of a sick old devotee,--point out to me the woman, young, beautiful, brilliant, and ambitious--who would not--in your place--have done precisely as you did?"

She threw her head a little backward, bringing into prominence the superb modeling of her columnar throat and the heavy lines of the lower jaw. Her wine-colored eyes considered him between their narrowed lids. She savored his words, silently, with palpitating nostrils, and rippling movements of the muscles of her tightly closed lips. And the qualities of treachery and cruelty, mingling in her strange character with sensuality, and pride, and recklessness, were written upon her beauty as plainly as they are stamped upon the individuality of a tigress, or a poisonous snake.

"You speak of weariness ... of boredom..." She spoke between her teeth, accentuating the vowels and prolonging the sibilants: "Nicolas, it was hellish--that _ménage_ at Auteuil!..." She clenched the white hand that rested on the chair-arm and continued, looking with burning eyes through Straz into the past.

"That woman--my husband's mother, with her parade of devotion for the absent. With her ceaseless repetition of 'my son,' 'my son's child,' and 'my son's wife!' ... Grand Dieu!--how she enraged me! How she made me hate--hate--hate them!--yes! all three.... Perhaps myself also, most bitterly of all!"

"We have a curious proverb in my country," commented Straz, with his snigger: "'_I draw water from a well that has no bottom when I tell my gossip of the faults of my mother-in-law!_'"

She said, with undisguised scorn:

"I am not a collector of curios from your country!"

"Ah, but wait! Hear the rest of it!" said Straz, dexterously embroidering on the original: "'_But when my mother-in-law wishes to acquaint my husband with my good qualities, she will write them with the plume from a gnat's head, on the paper that wrapped a butterfly's egg, when she has bought her ink at the shop where they sell none!_'"

Adelaide continued, ignoring the labored witticism:

"In the letter of farewell that I wrote to De Bayard I said '_Your mother will console you, I have no doubt!_' ... How often I have imagined I could hear her talking to him.... He would weep on her knees, like a schoolboy. She would lead him to look at the child, asleep in its cot by the side of her bed, and tell him, '_Do not fear! She will not be like her mother! She will grow up candid and discreet and virtuous!_' Everything that Adelaide was not, you understand.... Ha, ha, ha! Absurd old creature! Were she not dead, I should detest her still!"

Straz mentally commented: "The daughter has inherited the hatred, unless I am mistaken." Aloud he said:

"The prophecy, if made, has not been fulfilled, my Adelaide.... Mademoiselle, if inferior to her mother in splendor and beauty, certainly has been dowered with her elegance and charm." He bunched the fingers of his right hand, kissed them, and launched the kiss, conjecturally, in the direction of Paris. "A pocket edition of Psyche before that little affair with Cupid! A rare jewel! A _chic_ type, give you my word!"

The daintily shod foot had beaten time, as Straz enlarged upon the theme of Juliette's perfections, to what might have been the tune of a tarantella: now it ceased. She laughed in the Roumanian's face, and cried, still laughing:

"A child! ... A schoolgirl--who has seen no more of the world than the pearl in the oyster! All this is too funny--_give you my word!_"

Said Straz, lolling his head against the chair-back and licking his red lips cattishly:

"Ah, but when the pearl-diver opened the oyster, he said: '_Here is a gem worth a Kingdom, or an Empire, when it shall be polished and properly set!_'"

"'Or an Empire!'"

She echoed the three words, throwing her head back in imitation of Straz's attitude, and looking at him with languid provocation. Then she yawned, showing her perfect teeth and the tip of a rosy tongue, and remarked with an air of boredom:

"My friend, whether your pearl be worth an Empire or a cabbage-plot, your chance of proving its value is forever forfeited, thanks to the obstinacy of M. de Bayard."

Said Straz:

"Our plan would have been easier to carry out,--had M. de Bayard been more--complaisant."

She rose up, her beautiful face livid and gray under its artificial roses. Her eyebrows writhed like little live snakes, her eyes burned like wind-blown torches. She spoke, looking past her confederate in the chair, and with a voice he barely recognized:

"His mother must have prayed her Saints for this," she said, "that I should always fail in the moment when triumph seemed most sure. Max Valverden would have married me--it is absolutely certain!--had not Fate sent him back on leave from the Staff in Austria but a couple of hours too soon. Weak, sentimental Max! always threatening extreme measures. Who would have believed him capable of carrying out that menace so often reiterated! But this I know. Had he confronted me with what his letter termed '_the unmistakable proofs of my appalling treachery,_' I would have convinced him even against the testimony of his own ears and eyes. But De Bayard--but my husband!----"

She had forgotten Straz; she saw nothing but her own frustrated ambitions, the dead body of the man whose suicide had robbed her of a title, and the living husband whose stern rejection of her overtures had left her forever outside the social pale....

"Do I not know the man he is! With another it would have been so easy. He would have granted an interview,--I would have been suppliant and humble--I would have told my tale in such a voice! ... _You were away.... I was young and inexperienced.... I foolishly yielded to the persuasions of another.... Once I had let Valverden kiss me I felt myself smirched for ever. I fled with him because I dared not meet your eyes!_"

Straz sniggered. She went on, not hearing him....

"He would have taken me to his heart again. Once reinstated there I would have regained the _entrée_ to Society. For a woman who has lived within the pale--even if she finds it better fun outside--it is hideous to be _déclassée_. A few triumphs,--a little intriguing--and I should have been received at Court.... For the Emperor is above all a man of the world; and the Empress loves to surround herself with beautiful and witty women. With gifts, talents, charm like mine, I should have carried all before me!--I should have reigned--I should have drunk the wine of Success from a goblet of diamond."

"Without doubt," agreed Straz, "had M. le Colonel consented to receive you. Yet I contend, his refusal is a hopeful sign, if it means that he is afraid."

She winced as though he had thrust a knife in her side, and cried out:

"Afraid! You do not know him.... No!--I tell you, that it is to him as though I had never existed.... Did we meet, he would look me in the face--pass me by without the twitch of a muscle--without the flicker of a glance.... But you have shown me how I may reach his heart--and one day I shall thrust my hand into his breast and tear it out and trample on it.... It is she--my daughter--who will accomplish this!..."

Said Straz, pushing back his chair, getting up and blowing his nose loudly:

"Then the sooner we exchange these avenues of dusty lime-trees, choked with crowds of bellowing Teutons, for the boulevards of Paris, the better. We shall, of course, be forced to return by a _détour via_ Brussels--the Rhine Valley railways being reserved for the transport of troops. Passports can be had on application to the usual authorities. The only insuperable obstacle to our departure is--the bill!"

Madame came back to consciousness of sordid things as the Roumanian ostentatiously turned out his trouser-pockets.

"You are at an _impasse_ for lack of funds?" she asked him.

"Upon my life, my soul!" Straz smilingly assured her, "I am at present without a radish! A sum of two thalers negotiable currency constitutes my stock of cash. Although, as I have told you, I carry secreted on my person an order for"--he tapped his bosom--"ten thousand francs payable from the Secret Funds of the Imperial Government. This I tried to cash before I left Paris----" He measured off an infinitesimal quantity of finger-nail and displayed it to her. "Do you think I got a franc from anyone? No!--you know better! The Emperor's methods are understood too well. And thus it is that the disinclination of M. de Bismarck to finance our plan for the union of two young and ingenuous lovers has hit me in the midriff. A thousand curses on his niggardliness!"

As though prompted by some recollection of Adelaide's previous display of tragic passion, he scowled portentously, spat at the fireplace, then began to strut about, vaporing and waving his ringed, hairy-backed hands.

"Penniless.... What damnable absurdity! The Emissary of a Potentate! The Bearer of the Bowstring--with Life or Death in my hand. For lack of cash I travel second-class to that accursed South German Principality--I stoop to put up at a third-rate inn. My Mission performed, I yield to the promptings of my ardent nature. In the company of her who reigns sultana of my soul,--who for my sake has shared the discomforts of that abominable caravanserai--I return to the barbarous capital of the Hohenzollerns--I risk my person in the streets of Berlin. Had my brain been cooler--had your image glowed less seductively before my mental vision"--he rolled his black eyes amorously and laid a thick ringed hand upon his breast--"it may be that I should not have accompanied you,--that I might have hurried back express to Paris--presented myself to my Imperial master--and reaped the golden prize!"

"Say rather," responded Madame, in a tone not untinged with acrimony, "that as the result of your unsuccessful endeavor to enlist the interest of M. de Bismarck in that charming plan to unite two ingenuous young people--you are placed in a position that is not without unpleasant possibilities. My _beaux yeux_ are less to blame than your ambition '_to kill_,' as the English say, '_two birds with one stone!_' You----"

"Say 'we,' not 'you,' my divine Adelaide," corrected Straz, with tender insistence, "for if not in actuality husband and wife, we are thus inscribed upon the bureau-register. 'One in sorrow, one in joy,' to quote a poet of my nation. I wish you were acquainted with the verses of Stepan Mieciwycz. They would afford you exquisite delight."