Part 26

"Possibly," said Madame, with an ominous hardening of the facial muscles, and a whiteness about the lips. "What does not afford me delight is that these brigands downstairs have threatened to seize our luggage if their claim is not satisfied within an hour."

"_Sapristi!_" commented the Roumanian. "A beautiful imbroglio! And--as I have no luggage--beyond a traveling valise," he added with a gentle snigger, "your trunks, bonnet-boxes, imperials, traveling-bags, and so forth--must become the prey of the management. It grieves me to the soul that you should suffer this denudation at the hands of these coarse Germans. But what I cannot prevent, I can but deplore!"

"And if," she said in a vibrating voice of anger, "these coarse Germans should lay hands upon your person, for the purpose of ascertaining for themselves the state of your purse! ... What then?"

"What then?" Straz's cynical composure broke up. "_Istenem!--Istenem_! Nothing could be more dangerous! My letter of instructions from M. de Gramont, annotated in the Emperor's own hand! The official letter, of introduction from the Minister to Prince Antony--the copies of those three telegrams His Highness sent from Sigmaringen--the order on the Privy Purse--all concealed in a silk belt I am in the habit of wearing--these Prussians will find the papers should they search me to the skin. Then I, _with my wife_----" He italicized the sentences.

"One in sorrow as in joy, I think you said!" interpolated Madame, bitterly.

"We should be arrested--dragged before official interrogators!--imprisoned!--Oh! do not imagine I am laying on the colors too thickly. Is it incredible that M. de Bismarck might welcome an opportunity--pending the result of this war--to turn the key on us?"

"Why on us?" demanded Adelaide. "Do _I_ wear a silken belt containing incriminating letters? Orders on the Secret Funds ... copies of Hohenzollern telegrams?"

Straz looked at her, and his black stare hardened suspiciously. The swift Oriental blood that pigmented his eyes and skin, and fed the luxuriant growth of hair upon him, leaped in the dark to the conclusion that he had been betrayed. He said, smiling, and speaking with a lisp, a trick of his that boded ill, had she but known it:

"Not to my knowledge.... I have never searched while you were sleeping,--or spiced the draught that made the sleep profound."

"My thanks," she said, keeping her countenance magnificently, "for the glass of mulled Burgundy I gave you when you returned from the Schloss. You were suffering from chill--you shivered and burned alternately.... Like a woman, I did what I could--and you are ungrateful, like all other men."

"My soul," simpered Straz, "I adore you madly. But like every other man, I am a son of Adam, and you are a daughter of Madame Eve. And a little snake hisses in my ear whenever I am not looking at you: '_She would be truer to her sex if she were false!_'"

"Nicolas! This is too much! No, no, I beg of you to let me leave you!"

Adelaide had put her hand to her heart, given him a look in which passionate tenderness seemed to strive with wounded pride, quitted her chair, and hurried, the Roumanian hot upon her heels, to the door communicating with the boudoir. Detained by his feverish grasp upon her hand, prisoned by the muscular arm about her waist, she could only reiterate her desire for freedom. Straz asseverated:

"Yes! when you have forgiven me! Pardon, beloved Adelaide! Life of my life, you know we Slavs are naturally suspicious--it is always in our blood!"

He thrust his face to hers, amorously ogling. The slight thickening of the consonants, due to catarrh, made his passionate speech sound grotesquely ridiculous. The approach of his mouth, the contact of his breath, reminded the fastidious Adelaide that such colds could be transferred. So she smiled dazzlingly upon him, and gently freed herself from his enfolding tentacles, leaning her softly-tinted cheek downwards to the shoulder her own overtopped.

"You are pardoned, my beloved one! But think with me how this bill may be settled! What if you really should be in danger in this place!"

He shrugged hopelessly, and ejaculated:

"_Sapristi_! I can conceive it possible.... But--hampered by the lack of money, what are we to do?"

She said with a start, as if suddenly enlightened:

"Dearest, I have some jewels.... Think nothing of the sacrifice! ... Will it not be made for him who is more to me than all?..."

"Angel! ... Now I know, indeed, that Adelaide is true to me! Pardon thy slave, who dared to deem otherwise!"

Straz devoured her hand with kisses, became more enterprising as she grew, or seemed to grow, more yielding. But she put him from her, suffering her bright glance to linger on him amorously, saying in tones of liquid sweetness, with a bewitching accent of rebuke:

"Be good now! I am tired, and must positively dine in my room to-night. My maid will bring you in a few moments a case containing--what I mentioned just now. Late as it is, shops are still open ... there is a firm of jewelers--Müller and Stettig in the Charlotten-Strasse, who will buy such things for ready money.... It should bring sufficient to supply us with funds for a long time.... Poor Valverden paid eighteen thousand thalers for it!" She added as Straz licked his lips appreciatively: "It is a star of emeralds and brilliants you have often seen me wear."

"Thou art my star! O incomparable Adelaide!"

She pushed him from her, yet oozing with impassioned admiration. She gently shut the boudoir-door--and noiselessly shot the bolt. Then her face changed, and all her disgust for Straz, his cheap compliments--his slovenliness--his arrogance and self-satisfaction, his impecuniousness and his cold in the head, was written on her face and expressed by every movement of her body. She ran across the boudoir, abandoning her air of languor, burst into the bedroom beyond, and aroused a dozing maid.

"Wake up, Mariette! Find me--it is in the red morocco jewel-case in the brown leather imperial--the diamond star with emerald points!"

While the woman rummaged, the mistress swiftly reviewed the situation. The cold, clear brain that dwelt behind that velvet mask of sensuous beauty had formulated a plan for getting rid of the Slav.

He would be an enemy dangerous as a rattlesnake, she told herself. But--trap your rattlesnake, and he cannot bite. On the other hand, his subtle capacity for intrigue--his swift Oriental cunning--even his masculine strength,--made of him a useful ally, even when he had no more secrets for a clever woman to ferret out and sell.

For the brief telegram in cipher, dispatched by Madame to a studiously unsuspicious address in Berlin before nightfall of the day of the arrival in Sigmaringen--with the later-sent copies of Gramont's letters--the formal introduction which had secured the Agent from the Tuileries an audience of Prince Antony, and the four pages of secret instructions margined with the Emperor's annotations, had brought in a handsome sum of money, thanks to the potency of mulled Burgundy heavily dosed with laudanum. Adelaide had known a moment of deadly terror when the Slav's black eyes had looked at her with that sinister stare of suspicion, and his conjectures had leaped in the dark, so very near the actual verity. She felt no desire to encounter that look again.

So she pondered, fingering the bulky roll of Prussian banknotes paid her by Privy Councillor Bucher a few days previously,--how she might best get rid of Straz without another scene. His Oriental cunning, his childish vanity, his petulance and sensuality, his colossal greed of money and money's worth, blinded her to the ruthlessness and ferocity of his tigerish nature, and provoked her to brave a risk far greater than she guessed.

She would get rid of him--play the game he had devised, without him; and win, in spite of cold water thrown by M. de Bismarck. The trap he had planned to catch the son of the Emperor should yet be set successfully. Was not the intended bait of living maiden's flesh her own?

She felt no pity for the innocence of the girl, or for the inexperience of the stripling. She was curious to know how--under given circumstances--they would comport themselves; she was eager to bring to terms the Minister who had contemptuously rejected her proposal--she thirsted above all for revenge upon the husband she had wronged.

Straz stood in the way, therefore Straz must be swept aside. His mission to Prince Antony performed, the Napoleon would have no more use for the instrument. Perhaps that order on the Privy Purse would never be paid?

She arrived at this conclusion as the maid brought the red morocco jewel-case. She unlocked it with a key she wore in a bracelet, and drew out a shagreen-covered box containing the vaunted ornament. It had not been given her by her dead lover; the story of the thousands spent on it was no more reliable than the doubleted emeralds, and the thin central star of diamonds set flush with the gold setting of the toy.

But it looked well; and Straz was no good judge of jewels, and she had not paid Müller and Stettig the moderate sum demanded as its price. The merchants had been rude enough to dun her, and when Straz should appear and tender the article for sale to them, the manager would summon a policeman, and the Roumanian would be detained. He would refer to herself, but long before a representative of the firm could appear to interrogate her, she would have paid the hotel-bill and departed, leaving the price of the trinket in the hands of the management. Flaws in the plan, no doubt, but on the whole it was workable. She rose, took the star from the case stamped with the too-revealing names of Müller and Stettig, glanced in the mirror, left the bedroom and swept through the boudoir.

"Nicolas!" she whispered, unbolting the door noiselessly, and opening it a little way.

"My Peri, I am here!" snuffled the impassioned Roumanian.

She opened the door a little further, and thrust out a white palm cradling the glittering gewgaw. He pounced on it, leaving a kiss instead.

"Remember, Müller and Stettig, 85 Charlotten Strasse. Fly!"

"Sultana, I depart upon the wings of Love, to return like the bee to the rose, laden with golden pollen."

"Your wings, unlucky bee, will be clipped by a policeman," Madame said inwardly, as the drawing-room door shut and the Slav's footsteps crossed the little ante-room. There was a murmur of voices, that of Straz raised as if in surprise or interrogation. Probably the gilt-buttoned functionary had been lying in wait for him with the hotel-bill. She listened a moment, heard no more, and went back, saying to her attendant:

"Pack everything. We leave at once for Brussels."

The maid said, with peculiar demureness:

"And Monsieur, Madame?"

Her mistress told her:

"Monsieur has gone to call upon his bankers."

The maid responded with even greater demureness:

"Madame should know that in her absence Monsieur endeavored----"

Madame said hastily:

"Pay no heed. These are customs common in Roumania!"

The woman continued, bridling with all the scorn Lesbia's waiting-maid feels for the penniless gallant:

"Monsieur endeavored to borrow of me ten thalers...."

Madame shrugged and bade her:

"Go on with your packing! Monsieur does not accompany us!"

And without the exchange of another word the mistress and maid understood each other perfectly. The impecunious Straz was to be jettisoned for the lightening of the ship.

Meanwhile, Fate willed the Slav should encounter on the threshold of the ante-room the emissary of Messrs. Müller and Stettig, who had called for the third time to demand payment of the bill. This being offered for his inspection as the responsible male of the party, threw unexpected light on the intentions of Adelaide.

"Sixteen hundred thalers," he murmured. "Reasonable, too--most reasonable! I have seen Madame wearing the ornament, and admired it very much. Yes, if you desire it, I will speak to the lady. It is doubtless mere forgetfulness that has deferred the settlement of your claim. Wait here!"

He unwound a knitted silk scarf that was folded round his bull-neck. He turned down the collar of his Astrakhan-lined coat, and went back with noiseless steps. The door of the boudoir was ajar. He satisfied himself that Adelaide was in the bedroom beyond it. He stepped in, glanced about him, formulating his plan, then locked the boudoir-door, put the key in his pocket, crossed the room, and knocked upon the door of the bedroom, swiftly stepping aside, so that the door--which opened outward,--should conceal him from those within.

"Who is it knocks? Open and see!" he heard Madame command her maid within the bedroom. The maid appeared, crossed the boudoir, found the door fast, and returned to tell her mistress. But then she found the door of the bedroom she had quitted was bolted on the other side. There was no sound within, but a kind of rustling, and once or twice a footstep on the carpet. So, with the patience of her caste, the maid sat down upon a sofa until it should please her lady to undo the bedroom-door.

Her lady was incommoded by the grip of Straz's thick hairy hands upon her windpipe. He freed one in a moment--and then Adelaide was being blinded by the folds of a silken scarf.... Long, wide, and elastic, it served the Roumanian's purpose admirably. Perhaps it had been useful in that particular way before. And as he rolled and twisted it, he whispered sniggeringly in the little pearl-white ear that jutted from between the crimson swathings, almost as though it had been purposely left free:

"So, my Sultana!--so,--you would betray me!..."

Enveloped, she stammered through the silken meshes some barely intelligible sentences. The folds tightened chokingly--and the words died in a gasp.

"Mercy!... Forgive!..."

"Surely, my proud Sultana," said the thickish voice with the catarrhal snuffle in it. "What will men not pardon to beauty such as yours!"

She moaned and strove to tear away the smooth bands that were suffocating her. He whipped a velvet ribbon from the toilet-table, brought down her hands, and bound them behind her back. That little shell-shaped ear was purplish by this time. At the point of losing consciousness, she felt him softly groping for the treasure hidden in her bosom--she heard the crackling of the roll of notes withdrawn.

"_Do not...!_" she tried to say, but no sound came from her but a groaning; and through the roaring of her blood she heard him answer back:

"Do not rob you! would you plead, my peerless Adelaide? Far from it. I merely take from you what is my own! For--there was the taste of opium in my mouth when I awakened in Love's embraces. And conviction, stronger than proof, convinces me that I have been sold. Else why this store of honey in the breast of the Queen of the garden, while the black bee was sent roaming to gather store elsewhere? Eh, eh! I think I could manage to guess at the reason why I was to have been detained by those jewelers on suspicion of theft! My Sultana would have vanished, leaving no address behind her.... _Istenem!_ but the emerald star would have served your purpose well!"

There was a silence. Rings of fire, stars of emerald whirled before Adelaide's blinded vision.

"Do not be afraid, my Queen, I am not going to murder you!" chuckled the thick voice in the little swollen blackening ear. "Only to spoil your beauty a little--nothing more terrible. Your eyes will be less clear, your skin less dazzlingly unblemished, after this experience. You will never again look in your mirror without remembering me!"

Rocking and swaying, ready to fall, she was only kept upright by the arm of Straz about her body. She felt him free that arm, shifting her weight against his great chest, and as she lay blind and helpless there, his snigger vibrated through her horribly. Then--the smooth, slippery folds of the silk scarf tightened murderously, stopping all breath, shutting out consciousness. Whelmed in an abyss of Nothingness, she felt and knew no more....

"Madame is a little unwell," said Straz, who regained the ante-chamber by the way of a dressing-room communicating with Madame's bedroom. "She will call on Messrs. Müller and Stettig to-morrow, and settle their account. Meanwhile"--for the representative of the firm was beginning to expostulate--"she returns the emerald-pointed star with her regrets." He added smilingly as the relieved _employé_ gratefully pocketed the trinket: "Ladies are not business-like in these little matters of money. But Heaven, who inspired in man the desire to see them well-dressed, has conferred on him the privilege of paying their bills."

He accompanied the jeweler's foreman down to the vestibule, chatting agreeably. He carried no valise, so was allowed to pass out with the man. Keeping one thick, hairy-backed hand thrust down into a pocket of his Astrakhan-furbished shooting-jacket, close-clutched upon the solid roll of Prussian banknotes, reft from that smooth and perfumed hiding-place.

XXXI

"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red Prince--as people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in virtue of his partiality for the crimson uniform of his regiment, the Ziethen Hussars,--have departed amidst scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to take over the respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps. On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which I pen these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open landau drawn by two superb black Hungarian horses to join his Ministers and his Chief of the Great Staff at the station, where waited the special train destined to convey the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field Armies of Germany to the immediate Seat of War."

There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the writer's skull came smartly into contact with the uncushioned seat-back of the gray-painted, semi-partitioned railway transport-car, in which, with some forty blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard, P. C. Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in a din so comprehensive that you could only make your neighbor hear by putting your mouth to his ear and bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with dust and smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness, that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it with sensible effort.

The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began where the glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the eighth of a company appropriated to themselves the corner-seats. Sandwiched between two large and heated warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee, and his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs, P. C. Breagh abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and continued to write, using the old straw hat which crowned the knapsack as a support for a notebook.

"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring under the influence of emotion, accompanied His Majesty. A thunderstorm coruscated and detonated overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed out, and King Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of enthusiastic '_Hoch's_.' The object of their acclamations kept continually smoothing his heavy white mustache with the right, ungloved hand, between the salutes with which he acknowledged the plaudits of his people--a characteristic gesture of the veteran monarch when..."

The pencil faltered. "Under the influence of emotion" could not be used again, because it had already done duty for the Queen, whose eyes, poor lady! had been red with crying. P. C. Breagh knocked off to sharpen his pencil and read over what he had set down. "Coruscated and detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a good deal nearer the mark. And "characteristic gesture" was loftier language than "familiar trick" or "habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at it, it was true, but this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for letters, "describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and smelled."

Still, one could not hope to please everybody--and this was a descriptive article--not a chatty news-letter. When complete, it would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading Daily, with the brief intimation that more like it might be had--at a price. That it would draw commissions, P. C. Breagh believed implicitly. There was a stately stodginess about the style that could not fail to impress. So he continued as "_Die Wacht am Rhein_" broke out once more; and the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand neighbor tickled his ribs and made him goosefleshy.

"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."

"Ach, ach! but the old man looks tired!" people in the front had holloaed to one another. All the week-end one had seen the King bowling up, and down, and round-about Berlin in his little one-horse carriage, with a single, mounted orderly-officer in attendance; giving out colors, addressing the regiments, conversing in short, soldierly sentences with the field-officers in command.

"Baron von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff," went on the pencil, "the War-Minister General von Roon, and the Federal Chancellor and Minister-President General Count von Bismarck-Schönhausen, with the personnel of the Great Headquarters Staff and the mobilized Foreign Office, received His Majesty at the railway-station, tastefully adorned with black-and-white bunting, carpeted with red, and garlanded with roses, said to be the favorite floral emblem of the septuagenarian potentate...."

It could not be denied by P. C. Breagh,--the painfully hammered-out paragraphs smacked of the sample supplied by Mr. Knewbit for avoidance. "Sham technicality and sentimental slumgullion," he seemed to hear that rigorous critic saying, so loudly and in such a pouncing manner, that P. C. Breagh hurriedly scratched out the sentence about the floral emblems, though "septuagenarian potentate" must be reserved for use later, as offering a refreshing change from "aged King" and "veteran" or "venerable monarch." "Hoary-headed Ruler" would come in usefully by-and-by....

_Bump--bump--jolt, ker-link-ker-lank ker-lunk!_ ...

The two powerful engines, pulling a train-load of fully two-thirds of a regiment at fullest war-strength, were slowing up at a station: ... A roar of voices kept continually at crescendo hailed the arrival. Another roar, mixed with fragments of patriotic song, replied. The platform presented a sea of heads of both sexes, backed by an imposing array of shelves, decorated with foliage, dangling lamps and national bunting; surmounted by a bust of the King between busts of Moltke and Bismarck, and literally groaning under piles of sausages, loaves, cheeses, oleaginous packages of sandwiches and pastry--rows of gilt and silver-foiled wine-bottles, and then more rows....

Barrels of genuine Berlin beer, adorned with the Hohenzollern colors, stood hospitably ready to replenish glasses and mugs. Filled with the amber nectar, trays of these, suspended from the shoulders of stalwart youths, wearing Red Cross arm-badges, and white-muslin-draped maidens adorned with crimson sashes, waited to quench the thirst of Prussia's soldier sons. And taking in the condition of things at a glance, said one of the two N.C.O.'s in charge of the party:

"_Himmeldonnerwetter!_ ... Lads, there seems no help for it. We have got to tuck in again!"