Part 57

Day by day, while the War went on, and Paris lay raging and spitting fire within her impregnable, impassable girdle of human flesh and steel and iron--to this house where he sat solid and square at his table in his bedroom-study, reading over documents vomited by the great dispatch-boxes, or letters and papers captured with balloon-posts, or driving the pen with that tireless hand of his over sheets to be conned by Monarchs and rulers of States--came the Crown Prince of Prussia, handsome and débonnaire, or the dry, withered gentleman who bore the great name of von Moltke, or the War Minister von Roon, or M. Thiers, or the Saxon Minister von Friesen, or the Grand Dukes of Weimar or Baden, or the Duke of Coburg, or the Representatives of Austria-Hungary and Bavaria, or the English Ambassador, who had recently come upon a Mission to Versailles. Night after night, other and stranger footsteps crossed the threshold. Sometimes blindfolded officers in stained and weatherbeaten French uniforms had been led upstairs to that mysterious room where he sat, weaving his huge web of diplomacy, or manipulating with deft, capable touches the threads that moved both men and Kings.

Everyone came to this house on the quiet by-street of Versailles, that had become the throbbing center of the world.... From the greatest to the smallest, from the worthiest to the vilest. Now, last of all came--Adelaide de Bayard.

And with her came the question: How much he suspected. There had been one or two moments when Juliette had been temporarily thrown off her guard. Could one really deceive him, who was so subtle, watchful, observant?... Past master in cunning, ripe in diplomacy....

She heard his heavy footstep on the staircase as she held her bosom and listened. Madame Potier had finished his bedroom, and taken her broom and dustpan to the next. Madame de Bayard had been shown into the smaller interviewing-room, where the Brussels carpet had been paced into threadbare alleys by the feet of men who were topped by aching responsibilities--where the Crown Prince of Prussia smoked his big painted pipe of Latakia as he chatted with the Chancellor--where M. Thiers sat through long ordeals of torture in the little wicker arm-chair.

Would the mother of Juliette de Bayard sit in that chair? Her daughter knew how superbly she would rise and sweep her reverence to the Minister. How smoothly she would pour forth some false and specious tale....

The Minister strode in upon Madame, carrying his cap and riding-whip. His heavy countenance had the healthier flush of exercise, his great spurred boots were plastered with clayey mud. He had but just returned from an early ride with Count Hatzfeldt, taken at this hour "To escape," as he had explained to that elegant functionary, "the detestable clattering and knocking of that female Kobold, whose day it is to sweep my room."

"Why let her sweep?" Hatzfeldt had asked, and his principal had answered:

"I approve domestic cleanliness. And a room that is used as bedroom and study somehow harbors both spiders and dust. And I abhor spiders--nearly as much as cockroaches. Those long-waisted insects that swarm in the conservatory here give me almost a sensation of sickness when they scuttle away from my boots. I find a physical relief, actually, in crushing them."

He experienced something of that nausea and its resulting impulse toward extermination, meeting the bold eyes and the false ingratiating smile of the still beautiful Adelaide. He said, standing huge and adamantine between the woman and the window:

"Be seated, Madame.... No ... not that chair! Possibly I grow old, but I find that I can best deal with certain persons when the morning light is on their faces."

"As you will, Monseigneur!"

Adelaide mentally execrated his coarse brutality as she bit her lip, pulled down her flowered veil more closely, and prepared to sink into the little wicker chair.

"No!" he said, stopping her, "not that chair!--take the other. To my idea the seat you at first selected represents at present the Throne of France, or at least the Presidential fauteuil. M. Thiers occupies it when he comes to see me.... And he is a person whom I hold in much respect."

She winced at the side-thrust.

"I regret, Monseigneur, to have forfeited your good opinion."

"I do not usually bestow my good opinion," he told her, "upon ladies of your reputation, even though I may have reason to praise their sharp wits. Now pray state your business here. My time is limited."

She half rose up with a pained stare of wounded feeling, thought better of it, sank down again amidst her velvets and sables, and recited her lesson as taught by Straz.

The Roumanian, by dint of diligent, patient inquiry, had collected and pieced together with marvelous cleverness, the information gathered, correlative to the movements of Juliette. Her departure from the Prefecture at Bethel, her frustrated journey to the Camp at Châtel St. Germain--her halt at the village of Petit Plappeville, her search for the Colonel upon the battlefield, were all pieces in a mosaic miraculously restored. M. de Straz knew that Count Bismarck had seen and spoken to the young lady--had ordered separate burial for the body of de Bayard. He could even name a soldier of the German burial-party, who had helped to dig the grave. Subsequently Mademoiselle had been seen in company with a young Englishman ... she had returned with him to Petit Plappeville. The village had been raided and sacked by Prussian cavalry. Since when, Mademoiselle, with the young Englishman, had returned to Versailles.... She was occupying the Tessier mansion up to the moment of the arrival of the Chancellor with his Foreign Office Staff. And--by a most curious and deplorable coincidence, from that psychological moment to the present, all trace of Mademoiselle had been lost....

"Consequently," Adelaide wound up her well-conned lesson, "myself and M. de Straz have no resource but to apply to Your Excellency. Naturally M. de Straz desires that the daughter of M. de Bayard and myself should be extricated from a compromising position and placed under our joint guardianship. He takes--such chivalry is innate in his nature--a parental interest in the poor young girl!"

Said the Minister, smiling with cynical amusement:

"Therefore in the interests of Chivalry and Morality--you call on me--as proprietor of the seraglio in which you suppose Mademoiselle to have been hidden away.... You demand"--he struck the riding-glove he had removed upon the palm of the right hand it had covered--"and the hint of such a demand is a menace--do you hear?--a menace--that I should render the girl up to you, or pay through the nose for what I once declined to buy. You think at this epoch in the history of Germany--when the search-ray of international interest is turned upon the doings of that fellow Bismarck at Versailles--that I should not care to be classed with the Minotaurs who devoured youths and virgins. Madame, they were French monarchs, I am only a Pomeranian squire...."

He rose up, towering over the quaking woman, and strode across the shaking floor and pulled the green silk bell-rope by the fireplace. It came down in his hand, top ornament, wire and all, and he said as he looked at it and tossed it from him:

"That is a suggestion on the part of your Fate which I shall not adopt, though I could hang you and your paramour...."

He added, speaking loudly as Von Keudell opened the door, and the wretched woman rose and tottered toward him:

"Did I hold the secret of your daughter's hiding-place, I would not betray her to you.... _Adieu_, Madame de Bayard.... You observe that I do not add, 'and _au revoir_!'"

The great resonant voice had sounded through the whole house like a beaten war-gong. Lying upon the floor of her room, straining her ears to catch some fragments of their colloquy, it broke over Juliette in waves of thunderous sound.

Jean Jacques, below in the hall, was told by Von Keudell to "see the lady to her carriage," which, in virtue of her appointment, had been admitted through the Tessier _porte cochère_. The Swiss youth obeyed with even a clumsier grace than usual, the polishing-brush being still strapped about one instep, and the clout still swathed about the other foot, as he hobbled down the shallow doorsteps to open the brougham-door for Madame. As she stepped in and took the seat, her strained eyes leaped at his face suddenly. As he leaned in arranging the rug about her knees--what was it he heard her say:

"You are the English boy I saw in July at the house of M. de Bismarck. Do not attempt to deny; I never forget a face! When can you come and see me?... I must speak to you! I swear to you that I mean no harm to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard!"

Her lips were ashen under their rose-salve. The ringed, bare hand she laid on his rough paw burned like fire. He muttered in the weird _patois_ that passed as Swiss with some German occupants of the Tessier mansion:

"Madame will pardon.... One does not understand!"

She gave a disjointed, unmusical peal of laughter, that rattled the brougham windows.

"Droll boy! But you will come, whether you understand or not. The Villa Laon, Maisons Laffitte, near St. Germain.... Night-time will be best--to-night or to-morrow night." She added, looking at him over the lowered window as he shut the door upon her: "Ask for Madame de Straz. I shall be waiting for you. Do not forget!..."

The carriage drove on. He stood upon the lowest doorstep staring after it, for only privileged vehicles were admitted by the _porte cochère_. A hand fell heavily on his shoulder, startling him hideously. A terrible grating voice said in his ear, speaking in the Minister's excellent English:

"So, Madame Delilah has been trying her sorceries, has she? Come this way, my young English friend.... I want two words with you!"

LXXI

In the Tessier drawing-room, where the carpet was threadbare with the traffic of the feet of Princes and plenipotentiaries, and the brocade furniture was soiled with the contact of muddy breeches, and ragged with the rowels of spurs; where the bronze, bat-winged figure presided over the ancient clock of ormolu and malachite that had marked the passing of so many hours in this the death-struggle of bleeding France, Jean Jacques Potier stood up to give an account of himself, while just without the doorway waited a brace of muscular Chancery attendants, and the gigantic East Prussian coachman, Niederstedt, patrolled the terrace outside.

"You have not forgotten him! He used you somewhat roughly at the Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse. Nor, as it happens, has he forgotten you. Come!--what have you admitted to that Witch of Endor, _la veuve Bayard_? You are no friend to her daughter if you have told the woman that Mademoiselle is here, under this roof."

"So you--know?..."

P. C. Breagh had gasped the words out before he could stop himself. The Minister's flashing blue eyes lightened in laughter as they met the appalled stare of the young man with the cropped head and the green baize apron. He said, lisping a little as was his wont:

"I know, and I have known almost from the beginning. Everything must be known in this house. Did you suppose I had left my Prussian Secret Service at home in Berlin? Here! This belongs to you!"

He was standing on the hearth, his great back to the wood fire that blazed on the steel dogs. One of a brace of letters that he pulled from his breeches pocket, and tossed to the culprit under examination, fell at that wretch's feet.

"Pick it up, Mr. Patrick Carolan Breagh," he said. "You will find it a more-than-ordinarily interesting epistle. It was brought me something over an hour ago. Your legal friend, Mr. Chown, of Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London, advises you to go back there without procrastination. Your absconding trustee, Mr. William Mustey, Junior, has been found in Bloomsbury lodgings, the War having apparently frightened him out of France. Odd, because the scent of battlefields proves attractive to birds and animals of the predatory order. Mustey is dead, but luckily for you he has left nearly all of your property behind him. Some £500 of your inheritance of £7,000 seems to be missing. I daresay you will be willing to let the deficit go. What are you saying?"

His victim, with lips screwed into the shape of a whistle, had murmured:

"The Post Office.... Gee-whillikins!... they've given me away!..."

"Given you away!... You are a pretty conspirator!" The masterful eyes flickered with humor. There was amusement, suppressed, but evident, in the lines about the grim mouth hidden by the martial mustache. "Where should my blue Prussian bees gather intelligence, if not at the Post Office? Did you not _give yourself away_, as you term it, when you employed the time not occupied in smearing silver plate with whitening, and bedaubing polished boards most execrably with beeswax,--in acting as a voluntary assistant dresser at the auxiliary Military Hospital that has been established under the Red Cross at the Convent of the Sisters of the Poor? When a young Swiss--who is supposed to be ignorant of any language save his own extraordinary gibberish--betrays a more than superficial knowledge of French and German surgical terminology, and evinces a degree of skill in bandaging and so forth, such as you have permitted yourself to display, the German authorities, while they avail themselves of the young gentleman's service, are to be pardoned for supposing him to be other than he appears! Come, it is time this farce of yours and Mademoiselle's ended. I am going to ring the bell, and send for her, and tell her so now!..." The imperious hand went out to the bell-rope of faded red, and he stayed his summons to add: "Then you and she must pack up and betake yourselves to England.... I will furnish you with a permit to travel by railway and a _laissez-passer_. You will return to me a certain half-sheet of Chancellery notepaper which I gave you in the Wilhelm Strasse last July! Further--I have no advice to give you except that you would be wise not to select the theatrical profession for your next venture. You have not a gift for the stage, unlike Mademoiselle.... As for her, the vixen! you would do well to marry her promptly. Nothing else will cure a young man of the stupidity of being in love!"

There was something horrible in the mere fact of being taken so lightly, when one had waited in tense agony for the ominous flurry in the daytime--expecting in sleepless anguish the cry in the night.... The relief that mingled with the horror caused the muscles of the mouth to relax in a smile of imbecility, made one stutter and gulp because of the choking in one's throat....

The life of this man, who was meant when the great ones of the earth now referred to Germany, had been in hourly peril for months past. Now it was safe. She had not bent one's will, ineffectually, to the effort of restraining another's. One had not kept watch and put in one's word for nothing, remembering the debt one owed to that powerful ruthless hand. Not unheard had one prayed in an anguish of supplication that the woman loved beyond all Ideals, however heroic and overwhelming, might be saved from the fate of occupying a red-stained niche in History.

"Marry her promptly!"

He repeated the words, with the flicker of a laugh playing in his eyes and about his heavy facial muscles. His tortured victim, blood-red to his cropped scalp, groaned out:

"She is married already, Sir!"

"_Quatsch!_" said the Minister, laughing: "Married she is not. Oh, she has been married as the American canvasback ducks are roasted. She has been carried on a dish through the kitchen of matrimony, and taken out at the opposite door."

"But--my God, sir!--I have seen her husband!" cried the young man desperately.

"When did you see him?" asked the resonant, compelling accents. The answer came, bringing down his frown.

"I--cannot tell you!"

Came, curiously lisped, the words:

"I fear I must compel you. All this may lead to something more serious than I have thought...."

P. C. Breagh snarled, knitting the broad red eyebrows so industriously sooted:

"Twice.... There can be no harm in my saying so."

"And how recently?" The grating voice scooped into one's brain like a dentist's burred scraper. P. C. Breagh shook his head, saying:

"I can't tell you that!"

"Why not, if there is no harm in telling?" The voice was almost pleasant. "Was it as recently as three days ago?"

No answer.

"Was it as recently as two days? ... as twenty-four hours? ... Will you not answer for your own sake?"

The stubborn head was shaken resolutely. The Minister's voice said, blandly, persuasively:

"You may, for all you know, be answering for hers!"

There was a stubborn silence. The Chancellor said, with his suave, but warning lisp more perceptible than usual:

"Be good enough to touch that bell upon the table near your hand...."

P. C. Breagh obliged. Grams and Engelberg presented themselves. The Minister said, looking at them over the head of his sacrifice:

"One of you will convey my compliments to Madame Charles Tessier, and request her to speak to me here and now."

The stalwart, black-clad pair retired. The Minister pulled his cigar-case from his breeches-pocket, selected a cigar, bit off the end, and looked for a match. Meeting the burning stare of the gray-yellow eyes under the broad sooted eyebrows, he did not fulfill his intention of lighting, but restored the cigar to its place.

As he thrust the case back into his breeches-pocket the door opened. Madame Charles came in, wrapped in her white shawl, and moving with her characteristic limp and shuffle. Her glance went to the broad-shouldered, lean-flanked figure of the young man standing at attention a little to the left hand of the Minister. She was aware of the huge shape of the watchful Niederstedt keeping guard outside the terrace-windows. She heard the steady crunching of booted feet upon the graveled stone flags of the conservatory, recalling the fact that the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers were now quartered there. And she said to herself, even as she made her curtsey before the Chancellor: "The hour of discovery has come. Am I sorry or glad?"

The heavy stare met her desperate eyes as she raised them from the carpet. The grim voice began, and she strung her nerves to hear:

"Mademoiselle de Bayard, I have just closed an interview with your lady-mother, who is desirous to reëstablish over your person the maternal authority she once resigned.... That I have not betrayed to her your presence here I think you are aware already. I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that you were listening when I spoke to her loudly just now upon the stairs. Am I right, Mademoiselle?"

She said, meeting his heavy, powerful stare with eyes of burning sapphire, steadily under leveled brows of jetty black:

"It is not for me to contradict a person of Monseigneur's eminence. Might I ask why Monseigneur is pleased to designate me as 'Mademoiselle'? Madame Charles Tessier is my name in this house."

"Mademoiselle de Bayard," he said, ignoring the interruption as a man may when an infant has tugged him by the coat-tail, "I have to congratulate you upon your gift of grotesque character-impersonation, no less than your companion, whose Swiss-French _patois_, spoken with a British accent, has never since the first instant succeeded in deceiving me. But as one of my more amiable weaknesses is a liking for children, I must own to having found infinite amusement in the spectacle of Missy and Master, dressed up for grandpapa's benefit, playing the game of 'Guess Who I Am!'..."

He was laughing now, unmistakably. He said, smoothing the heavy mustache with a hand that twitched a little:

"But the performance ends here. So we may lay aside the cosmetics, costumes, and properties. The hero's green baize apron, crop-wig, and blackened eyebrows, the flour with which the heroine sprinkles her black hair, and the stockings and towels with which she disguises her charming shape. It will not seem surprising to you that a person of my dubious character should be learned in the secrets of stage disguises.... My early researches in femininity have led me into queerer places than actresses' dressing-rooms. But where did a Convent schoolgirl gain her knowledge of make-up?"

His mockery was intolerable. Her hate and scorn rose up in arms to meet it. She would be silent only for an instant longer, then she would speak and tell him all.

He was going on:

"I have here a letter, brought me some days back by the Prussian official who is in charge at the General Post Office here in Versailles. It is addressed to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard, 120, Rue de Provence. It is dated from Mons-sur-Trouille, in Belgium, and is written and signed by M. Charles Tessier.... I will not disguise from you that I have mastered the contents."

He showed her the letter. Monster! he had opened it. Her blazing eyes dwelt on him with a contempt he did not seem to feel. She had let the white shawl drop from about her head and shoulders. Now she straightened her slight form--(as though an artist needed the adventitious aid of towels and stockings!)--and thrust back with a superb gesture of both hands the heavy loops of white-streaked hair that masked her forehead and curtained her small face, whose cheeks, previously pale, now burned with angry fire.

He said, and as he withdrew the letter from its envelope, a small, square enclosure wrapped in white paper, slipped from the interior and dropped near his spurred boot:

"I have not only read this, but I am going to read it aloud to you. For the sake of one present whose fidelity to you deserved a confidence you seem to have withheld."

She caught one sharp breath, dropped her slender arms at her sides and stood immovably before him. Her clenched hands, tense lips and tragic brows, with that fierce flame of hatred and scorn burning beneath their shadow, betrayed the test of her self-command as he read:

"BASSELOT & TESSIER.

"WHOLESALE MERCHANTS, "WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.

"MONS-SUR-TROUILLE, "BELGIUM. "December 20, 1870.

"MADEMOISELLE:

"Relying on your good sense and amiability, permit me to make you a confession.

"Torn between the urgent commands of filial duty, and the dictates of ardent affection, I have yielded to the irresistible promptings of Love.

"Wedded to her I adore--the name of Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt can hardly be strange to you--I offer you the calm devotion of a brother. My mother is resigned to this alliance, at one time repugnant to her maternal feelings. She desires me to say that your luggage, taken on by her from the Hôtel de Flandre, Brussels, shall be forwarded to you at the Rue de Provence, or any other destination you may choose to indicate. Need I say that Madame Charles Tessier and myself regard you as our benefactress--that you will confer upon us the greatest obligation by consenting to remain beneath our roof.

"I would add that the capital of 80,000 francs invested by your regretted father upon your behalf in the business of myself and M. Basselôt can remain at the interest it at present commands (some 7 per cent. of annual profit), or be transferred to your credit at any agents or bankers you may choose to designate.

"Receive, dear Mademoiselle, with my regrets and excuses, the affectionate souvenirs of myself and my wife. My Clémence encloses some wedding-cake, after the touching fashion of England. She made it, she assures me, with her own hands.

"Respectfully and sincerely, "CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."

The reader added, as he looked about him:

"Where is the wedding-cake?--that white thing! ... thank you!"