Part 54

"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I should be inclined to believe she had written this." He added: "I have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an excess of tenderness is something quite new to me. How shall we reassure these excitable gentlemen? Buschlein"--he referred to his Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous "Recollections"--"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."

He spat and resumed:

"Private correspondents worry me to know whether I am really averse to the bombardment, and why I won't allow firing into the town? What pernicious rubbish! They will be blaming me next for all losses during the investment. Which are not small; for in little skirmishes, and during the short time occupied by those abortive sorties, we have lost more troops than we should have done had we regularly stormed the place."

He added, looking humorously at Hatzfeldt, whose handsome, _débonnaire_ countenance invariably fell at any reference to a bombardment:

"By the way, another balloon has been taken with letters from Paris, some of which I have already read, and a Figaro of yesterday's date. It has been decreed by the French Government that all wine and provisions are to be taken away from private people, as the poorer classes have already begun to fricassee their dogs and pussy cats. So your American father-in-law will have to look out for his cellar--an excellently stocked one, as I have heard from you. And your wife's famous mouse-gray ponies will probably be made into cutlets--a pretty piece of intelligence for your next letter to Madame!"

"Ah!... for Heaven's sake, Your Excellency!" cried Hatzfeldt, with ruefully elevated eyebrows, "I implore you not to conjure up the image of my wife's indignation and despair. Every letter I receive from her begins and ends with her precious ponies."

The Minister appended:

"Her mother, father, and her brother, Henry, who is living at their estate of Petit Val, near Marly--I think you told me--being sandwiched in between the little beasts."

They were pacing the garden paths. The Chancellor had recently risen, and seemed inclined to be in a jesting mood. He continued, throwing away the butt of a finished cigar:

"I must be careful, or the Countess will send me no more _pâté_ of pheasants, or sausages. Pray tell her, with my compliments, that both were excellently fresh and good.... Did you notice written on my table card that the Mayor of Versailles is to have a ten-minute interview before M. Thiers arrives at half-past twelve? If I have not polished off the Republican official before Thiers toddles up the doorsteps with his portfolio under his short arm, and his gold spectacles twinkling, engage him in conversation below here for an instant--do not send him up straightway to the torture cell." Thus the Minister had christened the small room adjoining his private apartment. He went on: "I do not want him to go down to Sèvres with his white flag and his escort, and meet Jules Favre with a string of tales about our orgies and revelings, of the enormous expense of which the Mayor is coming to complain."

"What insolence!" commented Hatzfeldt.

"It seems," continued the Minister, "that we all cost the town too much to keep, the chief offenders being the grand ducal and princely personages at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Of course, one knows that the Tinsel Rabble eat and drink a great deal more than they require, and waste much more than they consume. But to a Frenchman, one cannot admit as much. So I shall tell the Mayor that he must apply to the French Government at Tours for permission to raise a substantial money loan, and as M. Thiers has only just come from there, he would naturally buttonhole the old gentleman if he encountered him. Which--as our plump, neatly shaved old Professor is as timid as a hare and as soft as a baby--would discompose him very horribly...." He continued: "He is dying to make peace with us, because there will soon be famine in Paris. Imagine how I caught him out when I told him yesterday: '_Monsieur, you have only visited the city for a few hours. We know better about the contents of its magazines than you do. They have ample provisions to last until the end of January...._' What a look of incredulity! I had only been feeling his pulse, as it were.... His amazement told me what I most wanted to know. What a man to make a bargain about an armistice, an invalidy civilian, who cannot conceal his feelings! Who lets himself be put out of countenance and pumped!--actually pumped!"

He turned aside to cough and hawk and expectorate copiously.... "There!" he said, wiping his mustache vigorously with a large white cambric handkerchief. "You see what it is to have a stomach as sensitive as mine is.... That injustice done me in the _Berliner Zeitung_ with reference to the bombardment has caused an overflow of bile, by which I was already incommoded. Thiers will be certain to remain closeted with me for two hours. He is nothing if not expansive and flowery, and redundant. I shall not be able to get on horseback before three o'clock, and we dine at six." He went on, punctuating the sentence with more coughs and hawkings: "And as our table is to be graced--_tchah!_--by a huge trout pasty, a love gift to the Chancellor of the--_hah!_--Confederation, from a Berlin restaurant keeper who throws into the bargain--_ahah!_--a cask of Vienna March beer and his photograph, taken with his wife and--_brr'r_!"

He turned aside and spat vigorously, before ending, resuming, as he used the big white handkerchief:

"One would desire to do justice to a gift so welcome.... More bile!... I spat like this half the night through.... Decidedly I am not as well as when we galloped along the highroads with the Great Headquarters Staff.... I have wondered: Do I eat too much? Does this sedentary life conduce to indigestion?" He spat again, and answered himself: "How can it be so, when I breakfast on a couple of eggs with dry toast, and a cup of tea without milk? I don't lunch--lunch is a mockery of a meal--but in the evening I make a hearty dinner. With beer and champagne in plenty, and wash all down with half a dozen cups of tea. Then I go to bed--as you know, never before midnight. There's a doze--and I waken up with my brain as bright as daylight--all sorts of things running through it, and my mouth full of this bitter--_faugh!_"

"Your Excellency will need a fresh handkerchief," said Hatzfeldt, slightly shuddering, as the Chancellor vigorously crumpled the soiled cambric into a ball. "Shall I send Your Excellency's servant to fetch another?"

"No, no! As it happens, I have sent Grams out. And Engelberg is busy. There is Madame Charles's factotum!" He called in French: "_Hola_, Jean Jacques! Approach, my brave young man!"

His full blue eyes, their whites now red-veined and biliously injected, had turned to where the strongly built young male servant was still sweeping the steps of the rear of the house. Cropped to the scalp, you saw the fellow attired in a well-worn morning jacket of striped linen, a blue waistcoat and tight blue cloth trousers, yellow piped at the side seams. Summoned by an imperative word and gesture, he knocked the damp leaves off his broom, stood it up against the side of the conservatory, and shambled to where the Chancellor was standing, muttering with a downcast air and a furtive, sulky look:

"_Ouiche, Monseigneur?..._ What is it Monseigneur desires?"

Said the Minister, with a smile that curved the great mustache and showed the white, square teeth that a young man might have envied:

"Monseigneur desires that without delay the brave Jean Jacques would betake him to the kitchen, and desire Madame Charles Tessier of her goodness to favor Monseigneur with a clean handkerchief.... Perhaps two would be better.... Ask for two, Jean Jacques, and compel thy legs to rapid motion, for to _croquer le marmot_ is not a favorite pastime with Monseigneur! Comprehend you?"

Jean Jacques replied in his extraordinary patois, with a bow of the clumsiest:

"_Ouiche, Monseigneur!_"

"_De quel pays sont vous?_" asked Hatzfeldt curiously.

Jean Jacques responded with sulky unwillingness:

"_La Suisse, Monsieur!_"

Hatzfeldt said, as the young man returned to the scene of his abandoned labors, picked up his broom, and went round the end of the conservatory toward the kitchen quarters:

"There are Frenchmen who call themselves Belgians or Swiss because they are too funky to fight!"

Said the Minister:

"Madame Charles Tessier, who knows all about this fellow, describes him as a native of Neufchâtel. Here she comes herself, bringing my handkerchiefs. Thank you a thousand times, Madame! But why inconvenience yourself?"

Madame Charles, whose black hair, heavily streaked with white, was crowned with a dreadful lace cap with lappets, parted in the middle, and brushed down in two old-fashioned festoons on either side of her haggard white wedge of a face, shrilled in her raucous voice that it was no trouble whatever.... The laundress's basket with Monseigneur's clean linen had but that moment come in.

Madame Charles wore a gray poplin gown of rich, stiff, antique material, trimmed with black gimp upon the gores, round the bottom of the expansive skirt, and upon the sleeves and waist. It had been discovered in a wardrobe belonging to the mother of M. Charles Tessier. She had on one of Madame's black silk aprons, a pair of her black silk mittens, and the black chenille net adorned with steel beads that confined her back hair had housed the iron gray curls of her respected mother-in-law. Over her narrow shoulders hung the inevitable white woolen shawl.

She curtsied deeply to the Chancellor and slightly to Count Hatzfeldt, and went on into the garden, and disappeared round the corner of the ivy-bordered path. Seen thus in the searching daylight, the elevation and forward thrust of the left shoulder that lent her gait its unpleasant peculiarity, and the curvature in the lower part of the spine were even more painfully apparent. It occurred to her as she moved away from the two men, whose eyes, reluctantly or curiously, were following her, that to ape this deformity so persistently might be to bring it in reality upon herself.

She shivered a little, despite the bland warmth of the November sunshine. Round the corner of the green glass conservatory, well out of sight of those who walked in the garden, Jean Jacques Potier was shivering, too.

When the Chancellor had coughed and spat and spat again, the knees of Jean Jacques had shaken beneath him. His heart had sunk like a leaden plummet, and the sweat of terror had started on his skin.

He was afraid--horribly afraid. Not for himself, but for another. There was no knowing. The thing he feared might happen at any time.

"_Throw but a stone--the giant dies!..._"

He could hear now the very voice in which she had added: "See you well, it is I who am going to throw that stone!"

He had expended all the eloquence he possessed with the object of turning Juliette from her purpose. He did not know whether he had succeeded. She would give him no promise. She was sphinxlike, inscrutable.... You could never feel sure that in the middle of the night there would not be a cry--and then a commotion of running feet upon the stairs, and then--the arrest, and the accusation. He had made up his mind to say, when that happened: "_It was my doing. She knew nothing about it. It was I who put poison in the food of this man!_"

Then he would be taken out and shot. It would be done instantly, whether the owner of the life that had been attempted died or got well. Perhaps the man would not die? He had an iron constitution and the frame of a Titan. But sometimes he looked weary and haggard and bilious. And when he spat as just now, and pulled wry mouths over the bitter stuff he expectorated, the heart of P. C. Breagh would sink to the pit of his stomach, and his legs would shake under him, as they were shaking now.

LXVII

Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:

"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she does not fear damp, that is quite plain ... see how she trails her skirts over the wet grass. Now, if she were to show her feet, should we be grateful, or the reverse?"

A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes as he noted Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he spoke. He went on:

"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands that are exquisite. Have you ever looked closely at the hands of Madame Charles? If not, I recommend them to your notice. They are well worth looking at." He added, ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose that we follow her--discreetly and at a distance. I have still a few minutes before the Mayor arrives."

He led the way. They crossed a portion of the lawn and turned into a gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over with wet and rotting leaves. The shining patent-leather boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by their contact. The Chancellor, observing this, said:

"Never mind.... You can have them cleaned! My man Niederstedt polishes boots capitally!"

Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:

"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes. But never again will they be the same after a wetting. And they are made by the only man in the world who knows how to make boots."

The Minister said brutally:

"Order another pair of the fellow!"

Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:

"He lives in Paris--Rue de Lafayette. And Your Excellency is going to have Paris bombarded!"

Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal laughter:

"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of their own heads know a great deal better than that.... According to them, I am a humanitarian--altruistic to imbecility."

"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation, know Your Excellency better than they!"

The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the impending destruction of his bootmaker's establishment, incensed Hatzfeldt to the point of an imprudent retort.

The granite face turned. The heavy regard rested upon him. With his characteristic stutter--a signal as warning to those who knew him as the rattle of the _crotalus_ hidden in the brake, the Minister said:

"So I am not a philanthropist, or a--or an apostle of light and sweetness. I would prefer to build an Empire with the fallen towers of the modern Babylon?..."

Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the Russian Princess, his mother. The Minister went on in a lighter tone:

"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on the highest branches. They were bigger and sweeter and rosier than the others, though in stealing them I risked both my breeches and my neck. Well! To be plain, there are two apples just now that I particularly covet: the Bombardment--and the Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany from the Tuileries...." He added: "The _via media_ is not the surest road to an arrangement that shall be lasting. The most convincing arguments are uttered by the iron mouths of big guns!"

They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. The patch of green still spread upon the eastern boundary wall, where the water trickled down. The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the tiny pond cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his Infanta, but the pipe remained unsoldered because the plumber's men had gone to the War. Thus the Satyr's mouth remained dry, though the chuckle still sounded in the Satyr's throat.

Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the Minister and his courtly First Secretary stepped into the open. She started slightly, glanced round, bent her head, and limped painfully away.

Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward, misshapen figure:

"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to look over the garden wall!"

Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise. He objected:

"It would hardly be possible. The wall must be eight feet high, and how in the world could a woman, elderly and with that distressing deformity----"

The laugh that shook the great figure beside him puzzled as much as the utterance.

"She is a daughter of Eve--and it would be possible, by putting a toe in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman, to ascertain that I have had two sentries posted on the other side of this wall. Listen!..."

He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he habitually carried, and an answering rap came from the other side.

"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an unoccupied house," he added. "And ranged along the wall are bushes, behind which my two men stand well screened."

"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that quarter?" inquired Hatzfeldt.

"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the safe side, and Versailles is pretty well packed with people by whom I am rather particularly detested. But as a fact, I placed the soldiers for the purpose of catching Madame's postman. You did not perceive as we stepped out of the shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this creature's mouth?"

Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:

"Why, no, Your Excellency. I saw nothing of the kind!"

The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret laughter:

"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for seeing some things at a distance.... A pretty face behind a thick veil ... a graceful figure concealed by a shawl. Possibly the friend who communicates with Madame Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires her.... There is no accounting for tastes...."

Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:

"Who is Madame Charles's friend? Is it possible that misshapen creature has a lover?"

The Minister answered with a curious grimace:

"A lover who is apparently a _Franc-tireur_."

Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:

"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a black cloth uniform, and carry a black standard with a skull above a pair of crossbones. Perhaps his lady-love sat for the picture of the Death's head?"

The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:

"Possibly she did.... Though there have been moments when, under Madame's extraordinary coiffure with the black lace lappets, I have seen peeping at me--imagine what?"

"I cannot imagine.... Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.

"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue eyes...." The Minister went on: "But not only hatred.... Youth, and prettiness. Now, look here, and--for I am perfectly convinced that you believe me bewitched by our landlady--behold my rival's _billet-doux_!.."

Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter. The Minister put his hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted therefrom a little envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky scrawl.

"_To My Adored Wife._"

The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held the superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly proceeded to open the envelope.... Hatzfeldt, at first crimson, and writhing with repressed merriment, became graver as the Minister read aloud:

"_What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that are sleepless and solitary. Credit, my little one, that thy Charles is often near. In the thought of thy husband, if not in person, he rests upon thy heart so faithful and fond._"

Hatzfeldt spluttered. The reader continued:

"_We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig Hussars the other day at the village of Hably.... We shot down many of the Prussian marauders and killed their horses. Only eleven escaped with life. They returned later and burned the village, committing unexampled brutalities, and murdered several of the inhabitants. It is well! We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate._

"_All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war waged upon a merciless invader. We number nobles, peasants, citizens, criminals in our armed and organized ranks. Each man will kill as he knows best. The rifle, the knife, the scythe, or the cudgel, the gardener's shears, the chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are weapons lawful to be used against the enemies of France. We will dig wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by method and wreck scientifically. We will tumble them down wells, drown them in rivers, burn the huts they are sleeping in over their heads. And our sisters?--our wives? They are united with us in our solemn compact of destruction. They will embrace to strangle. They will smile and stab! They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les Prussiens, and the dogs will eat of them and die._

"_These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids. These for thy two little hands. Dost thou love me? Till death and after,_

"_Thine and thine only, "Charles Tessier._"

There was a silence. The Minister broke it with a grim sentence:

"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he is making love to his spitfire of a wife. A fine breed of young criminals should spring from such a union!"

The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment on the speech. The Minister had deftly opened the envelope without tearing the flap, which was still moist. He now refolded and slipped back the sheet into the envelope, wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from the hole in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the envelope. He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the clocks of Versailles struck the half hour, and said to Hatzfeldt, replacing the watch:

"Half-past twelve.... Do you know, I read something by Félix Pyat very like this"--he slightly waved the drying envelope--"in a copy of the _Petit Journal_ that was brought me the other day.... Now, my Mayor is due, and M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels.... I must return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed here."

"Here, Excellency!"

The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.

"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello.... Frankly, I cannot understand why Madame Charles herself placed this letter in the gape of the mask.... I am curious to know who will fetch it away from there.... I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and find out."

Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall. The Minister nodded.

"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see through these bricks. Really, I must ask you to stay here and oblige me. Von Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play instead of you.... Why, you are quite pale!..."

Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:

"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation. I am regularly shaved by a Frenchman, you understand!... And these _Francs-tireurs_ seem to be everywhere. Really, it is horrible!"

The Minister's brow became thunderous. The lines about his mouth hardened to granite. He said in his grimmest tone:

"They should be hanged whenever found! And not cut down, but left hanging, for a salutary warning to other rascals.... Do you know that the _Combat_--the organ edited by that blackguard Félix Pyat--wishes to get up a subscription for the purchase of a gold-mounted rifle to be given to the scoundrel who succeeds in removing the Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck. Well--_Auf Wiedersehen_! Ride out with me after lunch to the aqueduct of Marly, and tell me what I want to know."