Part 51

"Can it be possible?"

She looked at him intently and realized his earnestness. He answered with a glow of pride in his work:

"Fact! And in all the time you have never seen a newspaper or asked a question about the War. Even when you have heard the great guns firing from the forts below Paris--Issy and Vanves and Montrouge and the rest--you never said a word that showed you noticed.... Do you know why?..."

His voice wavered exultantly. She looked at him and slightly shook her head.

"No!..."

"Because I willed you to. By George! there are times when I believe that even yet I'd make a doctor. Mental suggestion was the line I took with you...." He rubbed his hands. "Not that I could have done anything without the help of Madame Potier--first-class little woman!--regular brick that she is!... You see, your brain had sucked up all the trouble it was capable of holding. You wanted rest.... Well, you've had it, thank God! Night after night I've walked up and down, backward and forward, on the lawn, just as you saw me doing last night, saying: 'Sleep! Forget! You have my orders to!"

The tone of mastery thrilled, even while the muscles of her mouth twitched with repressed laughter. He was beautiful in her eyes as he leaned forward smiling at her. She said, repressing her tears, and concealing her admiration:

"But last night you did not say 'Sleep!' but something else, Monsieur...."

There was a swift change in him, telling her that for once he was not listening. His eyes were alert, his ear eagerly drank in a sound composed of many sounds that grew louder as they came more near. Now the whole room was full of the trampling of horses and the fainter clink of spur and scabbard and bridle.... Cavalry were passing up one of the great avenues south of the Rue de Provence--not the Avenue of St. Cloud--probably the Rue des Chantiers--there was a distant roar of cheers.... Then in one little oasis of silence came the rolling of carriages, and then the walls shivered with the roaring of lusty lungs:

"_Hoch der König! Hoch der Kronprinz!_"--and the shouts were drowned in a great burst of martial music, and the trampling of men and horses, mingled with the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets, rolled on tumultuously again.

The blood ebbed from Juliette's cheeks and lips to her heart as she listened. Then the double doors of the dining room were butted open with the corner of a wooden coffee tray, and Madame Potier appeared with a steaming pot and two cups. She was pale round the hectic patches that blazed in her thin face. Her black eyes leaped to Breagh's with an eager question in them ... "_Have you told her?_" ... and he answered with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

Then before either of them knew, Juliette had risen. She went to the little woman and kissed her on the cheek. She said, taking one of the gnarled work-worn hands in one of hers and holding out the other to Carolan:

"Dear friends, to whom I owe so much, tell me now what in your great compassion you have kept from me. For I think the time has come when I must hear!"

The time had come, indeed, with the ring of Prussian cavalry hoofs upon the ancient cobblestones, and the roll of the carriages that came with them. And before either of those the girl addressed could speak in answer, the resonant sound of a Prussian trumpet pierced their silence:

"_Clear the way! Clear the way! Here comes the King!_"

And followed a cry, pitiful as the wail of a hare in a gin trap: "Those are Prussians!" ... and another scream, shrill and thin and clear.... Then a crash!... Madame Potier had dropped her coffee tray.... Before the hot steam of the spilled liquid rose up from the Tessier carpet, the small hand Breagh had clasped was suddenly, violently snatched from him. He sprang to his feet, but Madame Potier had been quicker than he. She had caught the girl round the waist, and now wrestled with her.... The silent, desperate strife was horrible. The slender black-clad figure writhed for freedom like a snake.... Then all at once the life seemed to go out of it.... They carried her to the sofa and laid her down....

"Monsieur should have told her!" Madame Potier said angrily. "Why leave it to the Prussians to break the news?..." Tears were running down her cheeks as she unfastened the girl's dress, and rubbed the limp hands, while Breagh dropped Cognac between the little teeth, a drop or two at a time.

And presently Juliette was looking at them, not wildly, and Madame Potier was answering: "It was nothing!... Madame was startled into an attack of faintness when I was so clumsy as to drop the coffee tray. Now I shall go and get more, and Monsieur will talk quietly to Madame as she lies there. She must hear everything that we have kept from her.... Yes, yes! that is quite understood!"

And she clumped away, with a backward glance of disdain directed at the masculine boggler, and Breagh drew a chair near the sofa where his wan Infanta lay, and sat down and told her all.

Red sunset flooded the autumn garden as he talked. Not a leaf stirred, hardly a bird uttered a nooning note. But the strange sound that had haunted not only the ears of Juliette went on incessantly. It was the sighing and whispering and muttering of the vast crowds that had filled the Rue des Chantiers behind the lines of troops to witness the entrance of the conquerors, and now gorged the great Place of the Prefecture (above whose entrance flaunted the standard of the Hohenzollerns)--filled the upper end of the Avenue de Paris--and surged over the vast expanse of the Place d'Armes, beating in black and restless human waves against the lofty blue and golden railings of the Royal Château, above whose golden dome floated the black-and-white Prussian Standard and the white Flag with the red Geneva Cross.

We know what he had to tell her.... The false step of MacMahon, the unavailing attempt of Bazaine to break out of Metz, the conflict on the Meuse, ending in defeat and the loss of 7,000 prisoners with guns and transport. The flight and escape of the Emperor to the fortress city of Sedan.... The battle between the ill-led, unfed, dispirited French forces and the Three Armies. The taking of 20,000 French prisoners, the wound of MacMahon, leading to his resignation of the chief command into the hands of General Wimpffen, summoned from his command in Algeria in time to capitulate. The pitiable surrender of the Emperor's sword to the King of Prussia. His transport into Belgium as a prisoner of War. The flight of the Empress from the Tuileries. The formation at Paris of the New Government of National Defense. The entry of the King of Prussia into Rheims, and the arrival of the First and Third Armies in force before Paris. The fight upon the heights of Châtillon--the defeat of Ducrot by a Bavarian Division--the German advance upon Nemours and Pitiviers--the investment of the capital, now encircled with an iron ring.

For three days the Crown Prince had been established with his Staff at the Prefecture. This day had seen the Great Headquarters of the Prussian King removed to Versailles, from Baron Rothschild's Castle of Ferrières....

Truly it had been time to break the news to Juliette. She lay still during the recital, only quivering now and then. She drank the coffee when Madame Potier brought it, and thanked the faithful soul affectionately. When the gas lamps were lighted, and the shutters shut, she bade P. C. Breagh good night in a faint whisper, and gave him both hands, saying with a liquid glance:

"Thank you, my friend!..."

He whispered as he kissed the little fingers:

"You will sleep to-night, will you not?..."

And she nodded in assent. But when he had gone to his bed at the cottage, the old terrible thoughts came crowding back.

That electrifying blast of glorious sound from the silver instrument of the Great Staff trumpeter had wakened and brought them like hornets buzzing and stinging about her ears.... She longed for her friend, but he had departed. And the loneliness was too terrible to bear.

She caught up a little white shawl that she had brought with her, and often wore when walking in the garden upon chilly evenings, or going to Mass in the early mornings, before the sunshine had warmed the air. One turn of the wrist draped it faultlessly about her head and body. Thus shielded, she went into the hall, and laid her hand upon the lock of the door.

As she did so, cavalry horses ridden at a sharp trot came clattering down the cobbled street. They were pulled up outside the Tessier mansion. There was an imperious tug at the gate bell. She waited for the opening of the kitchen door.

Then she heard it unlocked, and the clatter of Madame Potier's clogs upon the terrace. _Klop--klop--klop!_ they crossed the leads, descended the three steps that led to the gravel walk, and went on to the iron gate. It was locked, as always, in the absence of Madame Tessier. Presently the keys clashed, the lock scrooped back from the mortise, and the hinges uttered a protesting cry....

Then the harsh tones of a man, speaking French with a frightful German accent, turned the listening girl to ice. There was an exclamation from Madame Potier, a rejoinder in the stranger's gutturals. A horse trampled. The rough voice of the rider swore at the brute in German. Then there was a clatter of boots upon the pavement, with a great clinking of spurs and scabbard, and the now-dismounted rider said in his infamous French jargon:

"Go you before and open! His Excellency is coming in!"

Terrified, Madame Potier obeyed ... scuttling across the terrace like a frightened beetle. Juliette, paralyzed with horror, heard the heavy spurred footsteps crunch and jingle up the gravel walk and ascend the steps to the hall door. Almost directly, as little Madame Potier darted panting up the stairs from the kitchen, the hall doorbell clanged a deafening peal.

A carriage had rolled down the Rue de Provence, and stopped before the smaller gate, ere the doorbell's iron echoes had ceased shouting through the house of the Tessiers. There were other voices at the gate, other footsteps upon the gravel.... They mounted the steps. A resonant, unforgotten voice said to the ringer in German:

"The Herr Intendant General may spare himself the trouble.... I will interview the people of the house myself!"

The person addressed replied in the harsh tones that had terrified Madame Potier:

"But supposing Your Excellency be met with some insolence?..."

The resonant voice answered with a smile in it: "In that case, Herr Intendant General, my Excellency will take the risk. There are only women in the house, and should they offer violence, I have Count Hatzfeldt and Count Bismarck-Böhlen here!..."

There was a laugh--gay, mellow, and careless--and a young man's voice answered:

"Your Excellency may safely rely on our protection!"

There was another laugh. Under cover of it, Madame Potier hissed into the head folds of the white shawl:

"They have quartered the Prussian Chancellor and the Foreign Office upon us. That is what the sacred brute in the big boots and spectacles shouted, when I went down to open the front gate.... What is the Prussian Foreign Office?"

From the white folds of the shawl a sibilant whisper hissed at her:

"It is a man. They call him Count Bismarck. Now if you love me, be quiet, and watch and listen. He shall ring the bell with his own hand.... Then I open the door!..."

"But, Madame!..." whispered the distracted caretaker.

No verbal answer.... The white shawl pulled closer, shrouding round the slender form and girlish features. A little hand, firm and unfaltering, ready upon the latch of the door.

Poor Potier whimpered....

"Madame Charles.... My child! my treasure! for the love of Christ and Mary!... Tell me what you are going to do!"

The bell rang again, with a new and imperious hand upon it. She well knew whose was the hand. And the snow-water in her veins became liquid fire. She threw open the hall door and stepped back to admit the Man of Iron.

He stood upon the doorsteps like the house's master, a huge dominating figure, dressed as she had seen him on the battlefield of Gravelotte, in his high black, pewter-buttoned military frock and white peaked Cuirassier cap, riding cords, and great black jack-boots with long steel spurs. He was powdered with dust as a man newly come off a journey, though his boots were clean, for he had driven in a carriage from Ferriéres. Upon the step below him stood Count Hatzfeldt, his First Secretary, a man of thirty, tall, broad-shouldered, and _débonnaire_, wearing, as did Bismarck-Böhlen, the semi-military Foreign Office undress. The lean trap-jawed personage in a dark uniform with velvet facings, whom we must recognize as the Intendant General, waited in the background, glaring through his spectacles at the tardy portress in the white shawl, and the peaked face and flaring black eyes of little Madame Potier, who stood beside her mistress as ready to spit and scratch for her sake as a pussy cat to defend its young.

There was no pause. The dominating figure stepped into the hall. His great Cuirassier sword clanked on the threshold. He touched the peak of his cap with his bare right hand, and said, looking down from his great height upon the women:

"This is the house of the Famille Tessier?"

One of the women, who was swaddled in a white shawl, dropped him a stiff little middle-class reverence. Behind her, the other bobbed a serving woman's curtsy. He went on, addressing White Shawl as the superior:

"This house, Madame, has been selected as the official residence of the Prussian Foreign Office. We shall pay you an adequate sum for our accommodation, and remain here some weeks ... possibly three."

He glanced at Hatzfeldt, and said with a flicker of sardonic humor playing in his heavy blue eyes, and about the corners of the deeply cut mouth that was masked by the heavy iron-gray mustache:

"Though the actual duration of the visit depends--not upon ourselves--but upon the decision of the United German Powers, and the position which they shall decide to take up with regard to Conditions of Peace. We are not the invited guests of France, whose stay can be cut short because our manners do not prepossess our hostess. We came because we thought it advisable ... we will go when it is convenient to depart!"

"If Jules Faure could hear Your Excellency!..." said Bismarck-Böhlen, grinning.

"He would cast up his fine eyes more tragically than he did at Ferrières," said Hatzfeldt, "when the three words, '_Forfeiture of Territory_,' drew from them so many patriotic tears...."

"He is a weeper," said the Minister, pulling off his left glove, "and Wimpffen was a posturer, with his '_Moi, soldat de l'Armée Français_'--and the Duke of FitzJames is a manufacturer of bugaboos.... Our German caricaturists should draw him as a pavement artist, holding the hat beside a horrible red-and-yellow chalk picture of our atrocious cruelties in Bazeilles."

LXIV

We know that Bazeilles had been on the thirty-first of August a town of 2,000 inhabitants, mostly weavers, gathered about the ancient château that sheltered the boyhood of the great Turenne. Bazeilles had not observed the Law of the Neutrality of the non-combatant. The village had formed the extreme right of the French position on the day of the Battle of Sedan. Lebrun's Corps had occupied it, and its inhabitants had been seized with the fighting fever, and had helped to hold back a Bavarian Division for nearly six hours. Elderly civilians armed with antiquated rifles had displayed desperate bravery. One old woman, possessed of an ancient horse pistol, is said to have shot down three of the enemy. The men, their women and children, were now cinders mixed with heaps of calcined brickbats. The grim lesson had been taught very thoroughly. Bazeilles served as an object-lesson on Prussian methods throughout the remainder of the War.

"_I will remember Bazeilles!_" had flashed through the young head that was swaddled in white woolen. "_My friend shall not forget to tell me what was done there!_"

But the imperious hand of the Minister was upon the door of the billiard room. She saw it summarily thrown open. He went in, followed by Hatzfeldt, Bismarck-Böhlen at their heels.

"Capital!" he said to them. "We will have this arranged as a Bureau for the Councilors, the dispatch secretaries, and the cipherers. What is this?" He went to the glass door that led into the winter garden, looked through, and commented: "One could smoke a cigar here after dinner in wet weather; very well, it seems to me!"

The owner of the quick ears sheltered by the shawl of white woolen understood but little German, as she had previously said to her absent comrade. But what slight lore she had in the abhorred tongue had been gained in conversation with a Prussian mistress. She found that, thanks to the enemy's clear, melodious diction, she had no great difficulty in comprehending the substance of what he said.

His long heavy strides carried him next into the drawing-room, that apartment destined to become famous in history as the seat of the various negotiations which led to the treaties with the States of South Germany, the proclamation of the King of Prussia as German Emperor, and later, to the surrender of the City of Paris, and the settlement of the Conditions of Peace. The simply furnished, medium-sized room boasted a few mediocre oil paintings, a cottage piano, a sofa, some easy-chairs, and wall mirrors framed in handsomely wrought ormolu. Upon a little table against the wall stood an old-world timepiece, surmounted by a bronze figure with fiendish attributes, which engaged his attention curiously. His great laugh burst out, as he contemplated the grotesque.

"Now," he said, his voice still shaken by amusement, "if that malignant little demon be a model of the guardian spirit of the Famille Tessier, the Socialists and Ultramontane will be of opinion that I have come to the right shop!"

The young men laughed at the jest uproariously. He joined them, crushing down their lighter merriment with a mirthful giant's thunderous "Ha, ha!..." Then the double doors of the drawing-room opened. He came out with his followers into the hall place, demanding of little Madame Potier in fluent French whether gas was laid on in the rooms above:

"I think it probable, for you are a luxurious people in your habits, even down to the _bourgeoisie_ and peasantry of France. At home, I am accustomed to go to bed with a candle, and blow it out when I get between the sheets. But here in Gallia I shall do as the Gauls!"

"There is gas in the bedrooms, Monseigneur!" shrilled White Shawl.

"So!" He looked down from his great height upon the speaker. She caught up a box of matches from the hall table and thrust it into Madame Potier's shaking hand....

"Go up quickly. Light the gas in the bedrooms. Monseigneur wishes to examine them all!" She added in her shrill voice: "They are in use at the moment, but can be vacated and got ready for the occupation of Monseigneur in something less than half an hour!" She broke off to shriek to the ascending Madame Potier.... "Quicker, Jeannette! Thou art always as slow as a tortoise!... But I come myself!..." And with a halting, shuffling gait which made Count Bismarck-Böhlen grin, and even the polished Hatzfeldt put up his eyeglass, she jerked across the beeswaxed parquet of the hall, and mounted the gray-and-red drugget-covered stairs.

What virtue lies in contrasts! When Juliette de Bayard walked, you learned what poetry could be in simple motion. Her skirts had a rhythmic swing and flow. Those little feet of hers made twenty steps to the stride of an ordinary English girl. At Mass, when folded in her white School veil, she advanced to the Communion rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament, she swam, she rocked as though upborne on waves of buoyant ether. Watching her, you would have said that thus Our Lady must have glided onward, bearing the gracious burden of her Divine Child.

This peacock-voiced creature who hid under a white shawl what the men who sneered at her dimly felt must be a countenance ugly to repulsiveness, had one shoulder thrust upward and forward, reaching nearly to the ear on that side.... A palpable curvature of the spine caused the curious gait, and possibly to this deformity might be attributed the voice that was so harsh, raucous, and torturing to the ear.

"Do not laugh.... It is pitiable rather than ridiculous," she heard her enemy say, in his own tongue.

Hot wrath, fulminating indignation, mingled in Juliette with the pride of the comedian who has made an effective exit.... To be pitied by him, and for a second time! That liquid flame that circulated through her veins, illuminated her brain in its every cell and convolution. By its lurid light she saw her own intention in all its ugliness. Was she to blame, who had fled from this her destiny? Had she sought for her vengeance? Of his own will had he not come, this world-shaking Colossus, to find his Fate waiting for him?

And Breagh. What of her promise to her comrade? The thought was a knife-keen stab compelling a shriek. She stifled it in the folds of the shawl, bent down her head, and with an exaggeration of the grotesque gait, scuttled upstairs with the agility of an escaping spider, provoking a guffaw from the Twopenny Roué, a laugh from the well-bred Hatzfeldt, even a deep chuckle from the Enemy. Let him laugh! As she fled from room to room, and the gas-jets leaped up flaring and shrieking under her small, fierce hand, like little Furies and Vengeances, and tell-tale articles of feminine attire and use were caught up and thrust into a small portmanteau, she bade him laugh as much as he would. As she opened a cupboard by the chimney-piece where Madame Tessier had kept medicine and cosmetics, and took from the shelf a flat-topped, wide-mouthed chemist's vial, and thrust it within her dress, deep into her bosom, she told herself that France should laugh before long!

Meanwhile, her enemy and France's waited, chatting in the hall at the foot of the stair. When she descended, he went up with Hatzfeldt and Bismarck-Böhlen, and made a brief inspection of the rooms. His own choice was made with the least delay possible. Opening from the square, skylighted landing at the head of the main staircase, was a room, some ten paces long and seven broad, lighted by one window on the right side of the main front, looking toward the stables, and commanding a view of the pleasance and shrubbery from two more windows in the eastward wall. This apartment, which was partly above the dining room, and had been occupied by Madame Charles Tessier, the Minister appropriated to his own use. A second room, communicating with this, and looking on the pleasance, and boasting also a glass window door leading out upon the iron bridge topping the conservatory on the south side, he set apart for Bismarck-Böhlen.