Part 60

Long before his table companions had reached the zenith of their sensuous enjoyment, the Crown Prince had finished his temperate meal. The Chancellor commented mentally, glancing at the clear, rather set features of the great golden-bearded figure seated beside him:

"Fritz is endeavoring to impress myself and these Bavarians, with whom it rests to decide whether he is Emperor or no Emperor, _par la fermeté de son attitude_ with regard to the pleasures of the table, and by the Spartan simplicity of his habits and tastes. How I should like to offer him black broth and barley bread in a special wooden bowl and platter. But that, I suppose, would be _lèse majesté_."

And closely emulated by Von Holnstein and Von Pranky, he gave free reign to his Gargantuan appetite, taking twice of nearly every course, and washing the huge meal down, as was his habit, with floods from Rheims and Épernay.

When the cloth was drawn and fresh relays of wine appeared, the Prince accepted but a single glass of _fine champagne_ with his coffee. When the costly cigars were offered, he pulled from his pocket a porcelain pipe bearing his crest and monogram, painted and sent him by his English wife as a Christmas present, and said:

"I should prefer to smoke this, if Your Excellency does not mind."

Dinner over, His Royal Highness, with the Bavarians and the Minister, repaired to the salon. Overhead, Mademoiselle de Bayard, lonely in her prison bedroom on the second floor, heard their voices--deep, sonorous bass, shrill tenor, and penetrating, resonant baritone--engaged in discussion or joining in argument. At ten o'clock the Prince took leave, attended to his vehicle as previously by the Chancellor, to whom he said, in a low tone, as he pressed his hand:

"We are now no longer North Germans, but Germans. I shall urge upon my father the speedy proclamation of the Empire with all external state. Names, arms, titles, colors place us before the world in a proper light. I have never coveted a Crown Imperial. I denounce the idea of a bombardment as brutal and unnecessary. But I am willing to reap all the honors and advantages that can be gained from our victory. Impress this upon my father, who treats pomp and solemnity with indifference. As to demanding the old crown of Charlemagne from Vienna, I do not at all see the necessity for that. I shall write to my wife to-night!"

And _Unser Fritz_ got into the exquisite sledge that had been given to the beautiful Empress by the Third Napoleon, and was whirled away in a glittering dust of snow, kicked up by the fiery Orloffs' heels. And the Chancellor, recovering from his deep, ceremonious bow, wheeled and went back up the steps, with his bald head glittering in the ruddy torchlight.... None might guess what savage triumph swelled the heart beating under his white full-dress uniform, upon this the night that set upon the fabric of the man's colossal labors the copingstone of Success.

The Bavarian plenipotentiaries took leave within ten minutes. Count Hatzfeldt had been summoned to the salon a few moments previously. When the unseen bustle of their departure had subsided, the Secretaries and Councilors, smoking and drinking tea in the dining-room, were unexpectedly joined by the Minister.

All rose up as he suddenly opened the folding doors, thrust in his head and shoulders, and surveyed them, smiling. Behind him was Hatzfeldt, pale and excited, and with eyes that seemed dancing out of his head. There was a silence of expectation, then the great figure moved to the table, and men scattered to make space for him as though his contact might have slain.

He wore full-dress White Cuirassier uniform, without the steel cuirass, and the First and Second Classes of the Iron Cross, and the Red Eagle, with the peculiar deporation that he always sported, and which had been given him in his young manhood for saving life. His bald forehead and great domed cranium were studded with shining drops of perspiration, under his tufted brows his blue eyes blazed with a triumph almost fearful; his straight-bridged, snub-ended nose, thick cheeks, and bulldog jowl were crimson and dripping. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped them--and the hand that held the linen palpably shook.

He said to them all, and they held their breath to listen:

"Gentlemen, the Bavarian business is settled, and everything signed and sealed. We have got our German Unity--and our German Empire!"

There was a deep silence for a moment, broken by Busch's request to be allowed to take the pens with which the treaty had been signed. He got permission.

"That little Busch," said the Minister, "will never lose anything for want of a tongue. If he thinks to find there the gold pen set with brilliants, that was sent me by the Hamburg jeweler, he is mistaken. Come!" he added, "this is a great occasion!" and bade Hatzfeldt ring for a servant and order up more champagne.

The wine was brought and opened. He said to the servant who officiated:

"Let the house steward know that some wine is to be sent to the clerks and decipherers in their room. The servants also are to have what they like best for drinking--I fancy Niederstedt will choose Old Nordhausen. But--short of my best liquor, let what each likes best be given to him. No!--not that glass. I will drink out of my biggest goblet!..."

With the fizzing bumper in hand, he waited until all had been served, looking, as he reared his great bulk at the head of the full table, the biggest man, mentally and physically, who had ever served the Hohenzollern. In his most powerful tones, he called the toast:

"_Hoch!_ to His Imperial Majesty, our Kaiser Wilhelm!"

Every man there strained his lungs to the utmost, but the great bull voice of the Chancellor drowned every other there.

He talked a little more: "We should never have hooked the King of Bavaria, but for the pluck of Holnstein, who set off from Munich to tackle His Most Gracious at his Palace of Neuschwanstein, and--there being no railway--made in six days a journey of eighteen German miles on foot and on horseback over mountain passes, agreeably diversified by forest tracks and timber roads."

He drank and went on:

"He arrived, to find His Majesty nursing his toothache in absolute solitude, invisible to human eyes, save those belonging to the dentist, his valets and fiddlers and grooms. At first the King refused to receive him, but Holnstein was clever enough to gain over the dentist to deliver a letter from his own hand, and incidentally one written by myself...."

He went on, with a smile that curved the great mustache into lines of gayety:

"Knowing myself particularly detested by King Ludwig, I had taken pains to make my letter acceptable. I said in it that my family had enjoyed the patronage of his family a trifle of five hundred years ago. I mentioned that reinstitution in the Wittelsbach good graces had been the object of my whole life's labors. I incidentally pressed the claims of the King of Prussia to be made Emperor of Germany. I enclosed, with many apologies, the draft of a letter which expressed the concurrence of Bavaria. 'Your Majesty has only to copy this and sign it,' I added, 'and the troublesome business is closed.' What a prospect to a monarch afflicted by an obstinately throbbing gumboil! There was no paper or pen at hand with which to answer, so the dentist presented his patient with a sheet out of his pocketbook, and the patent ink reservoir pen with which he writes his prescriptions. King Ludwig sits up in bed, scrawls a copy of my draft reply, and the German Empire is made.... The Festival of the Orders and the Proclamation of the Emperor will come off in the Great Hall of Versailles upon a certain date not far off.... I will leave you to guess what the date is likely to be!..."

In the midst of a deafening tumult of joyful outcries and congratulations, he turned his great eyes upon one excited face after another, and drained his capacious glass and set it down.

"And with all this, gentlemen, our hopes might have foundered.... The Royal sign manual might have availed us nothing!... the Treaty might never have been signed!... Everything has depended upon a question as trivial and ridiculous as indeed are most of our human vanities. Imagine the gravity of the question at issue!... Whether the Bavarian officers are in future to wear the marks of their military rank upon their collars as heretofore, or on their shoulders, like us North Germans?... Upon that the German Empire has dangled, do you hear? Ah! how many times," he said, "I have been tempted to break out and tell those fellows in the devil's name to sew their stars and badges on the seats of their breeches. But I comforted myself with the old adage: _Politeness as far as the last step of the gallows, but hanging for all that!_"

They roared with laughter. He called:

"Fresh bottles! A little excess may be pardoned, upon this of all the nights in the year. Really, I need a buck-up after all that I have suffered, what with this Bavarian business, with Gortchakoff's Note, and the bumptiousness of the English, who, without knowing why or wherefore, are bellowing for war. All that danger has been avoided by the exercise of a little diplomacy.... But how can we expect to be taken seriously by the Powers when we procrastinate in the matter of the Paris Bombardment--which ought to begin at once!"

There was a hubbub of acquiescence, from which only the voices of Hatzfeldt and Abeken were missing.

Bismarck-Böhlen begged leave to propose a toast. The Minister asked, tolerantly regarding his young relative, who vibrated with suppressed hiccups, and was palpably unsteady upon his long legs:

"What is this toast we are to drink?"

Bismarck-Böhlen, in labor with speech, got out with a final effort:

"The--_hic!_--bombar--_hic!_--ment! Big--_hic!_--potarroes for Paris!"

"Ah, as God lives!" he said to them, "I must drink that toast!"

It went round. Hatzfeldt followed with:

"Our glorious Chancellor!"

"Our glorious Chancellor! Our great, ineffable, powerful Kaiser-maker! _Hoch!_ the Fürst von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Imperial Germany's master-mind!"

Sobs mingled with their acclamations. Their faces were now purple red with the exception of Hatzfeldt's, which was ghastly, and Bismarck-Böhlen's, which presented a combination of shades, in which pea green and orange predominated, as, bathed in tears, he staggered to embrace his august relative. He was turned off with a single jerk of the Minister's wrist, to fall weeping on the bosom of Privy Councilor Abeken, who, shocked at finding himself involved in something approaching to an orgie, was in the act of escaping from the room.

"My thanks for the toast!" said the resonant voice in their dulled and singing ears, "but pray all remember that I am no longer the North German Chancellor, or even the Chancellor of the Germanic Federation, but Chancellor of the German Empire, which has a better sound! And this is now, or will be by the New Year--the Imperial German Chancellery, and Foreign Office, while you, my friends, are Imperial Privy Councilors, Secretaries, and so on. We will baptize your green honors in a fresh round of champagne, and then I must leave you. I have yet before me some hours of hard work, and must keep my head clear and cool."

He held his great glass to the now drunken servant to be filled up.

"_Prosit!_" he said, and lifted the capacious vessel high, and tossed off the wine and dashed the costly goblet into the fireplace, where it exploded in crystal fragments and sparkling dust. Had they tried, his satellites could not have followed his example. Their leaden arms could only lift the wine to their dribbly lips. They drank--and one by one each toper collapsed and buckled as though the solid oak floor had given way under his boneless feet. Hatzfeldt sank prone across a chair. Bismarck-Böhlen had rolled under the table some moments previously, where, judging by the ominous nature of the sounds that asserted his presence, Madame Tessier's Brussels carpet was suffering for his excess. Similar noises, stertorous snores were reëchoed from other quarters as the Minister surveyed his fallen warriors:

"Men cannot drink in these days!" he commented, and left the room.

LXXV

He threw on his cap and his great white cavalry cloak lined with Russian sables and passed out by the front door into the still white night. The snowstorm was over, the fall had lessened to the merest sprinkle. The bitter northerly wind no longer drove the blizzards screaming before it, each tree stood immovable under its burden, the overloaded evergreen bushes lay flat upon the ground. And the moon sailed high, drifting away eastward. Through the tatters of the frost-fog shone the great blazing jewels of the stars.

Twelve o'clock struck near and far, and from the great Cathedral of the Place St. Louis, as from every bell-graced tower and steeple in Versailles, rang the Christmas carillon. Many voices broke upon the piercing, windless quiet. Many footsteps were passing through the snowy streets. Catholics were going to their Midnight Mass and Communion to be celebrated by permission of the Prussian Minister. He pictured the crowds that would flock to the great churches of Paris--how Notre Dame would be packed to the doors, and Ste. Marguerite, also the great Church of the Carmelites, and the ancient church of the Augustine Fathers in the Place des Victoires....

He imagined the flower-decked High Altars in the churches and chapels of Versailles thronged about with war-weary, famine-bitten refugees and residents. German Catholics would mingle with them--the conqueror and the conquered kneeling side by side. Wounded soldiers of both nations would help each other to limp to the Communion rail; the atmosphere of the hushed, crowded sanctuaries would throb and vibrate with prayer....

For what boon would all these suppliants entreat High Heaven most fervently? Pacing in and out of the snowy garden alleys, his giant shadow passing over the moveless tree shadows, he asked himself the question. There was but one reply:

For Peace.... They would pray to GOD for Peace ... that Bismarck was not going to give them yet a while. Under the icicles that had formed on his great mustache he laughed. And a Satanic pride swelled within him as he told himself that this was his crowning hour of life.

The wild sweet frenzy of the bells was dying down. Distant refrains of sturdy German carols came from the military quarters and the barracks. The bells stopped, wavered, broke out again, grew faint, and were still. And it seemed to the man standing in the chill silence of the snowy garden as though he heard the Spirit of France and the Spirit of Germany communing in the depths of this Christmas Night.

It was the voice of France that wept:

"_Alas! miserable that I am, what hast thou done to me? Why have thy fierce hordes rolled down upon me from the strange Pagan lands in the inclement East? Was it my fame, or my wealth, or my beauty that tempted thy Hunnish warriors, the yellow-haired footmen, with hard, blue-eyed faces and huge hairy limbs, and the uncouth, fierce tanned horsemen, who ride as though they were one with their beasts? Woe is met for my white breasts that were kissed by the conquering Roman! must I yield them again to be bruised by the ravishing Frank? A curse on thee! thou treacherous, deep-flowing, swift river, that hast again proved no barrier to the Prussian invader! I am fallen a prey to the Confederation set up by the Corsican upon the Rhine. Oh! hard as the nether millstone! Wilt thou unpitying, behold Famine devour my beauty? See, the white limbs that show through my tattered garment are fleshless! No man who looks upon me would desire me more! For what hast thou dug a pit about me and set up thy terrible war engines? Was I not willing to make terms with thee, as the conqueror?_"

It was the Voice of Germany that answered:

"_O Gaulish Queen! thou wert willing, but not for the conquered is it to appoint the sum of the ransom, or hold parley with the victors regarding the price of blood! Hearest thou, O fallen one? I withdraw my triumphant legions when it pleases me. This is a land where the wine and the women are luscious. When we have drunken deep enough, we shall load ourselves with spoil and treasure and go. Yet ere I withdraw, I shall have known thee as a lover, whose desire is kindled the fiercer because of thy hate. Death shall be the priest who celebrates our espousals. He shall unite us with a ring of steel and fire. Then I depart, leaving thee to the enemies of thine own household, who shall wreak thee greater ruin than thy foes. But a child shall be born of thy long resistance and my fierce triumph and our brief mingling, who shall be called Peace! Hearest thou, O France?_"

He listened, standing on the hard-frozen, white-powdered garden path between the swept-up snow mounds. There was no answer. He returned, stamping the snow from his clogged spurs, to the house.

The door stood open as he had left it. The even tread of the sentries came from the Rue de Provence. He had heard the guard being changed at the entrance gates and beyond the wall at the bottom of the garden. Those without were vigilant if those within were not. He remembered, noting the absence of the usual Chancery attendant from the hall bench, that he had given permission to the servants, without distinction, to make merry upon this night. He could hear no clinking of glasses and bottles belowstairs. Perhaps sleep had overtaken them as it had the revelers in the dining-room. He softly opened the double doors of that apartment. A stench combined of stale tobacco, spilled wine, and alcoholic humanity offended his nose, and he withdrew it. But not before he had ascertained that with the exception of Abeken, who had left early, and Count Hatzfeldt, who must have been taken home--the Staff slept there.

He looked into the drawing-room. The fire lay in gray ashes between the fire dogs. On the table lay the signed Treaty with Bavaria. He picked it up and rolled it, looking at the mantelshelf, where the bat-winged bronze demon brooded over the ormolu clock.

The room, whose hearth was cold, whose windows, closely shuttered, bolted and blinded, had the curtains drawn close over them, was lighted by a yellow ray shining through the glass door opening into the conservatory. He crossed to this door and looked through. Commendably sober, the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers who were quartered here sat chatting in whispers and smoking by the stove. Between them on an upturned tub bottom stood a little, twinkling, taper-lit Christmas tree.

"Von Uslar! Bleichröder!..."

The Minister opened the glass door and looked in. The officers sprang to their feet and stood saluting him. He smiled at the little tree, and asked, nodding at the door at the end of the conservatory, leading to a room where the library of the late M. Tessier had peaceably moldered until the clerks and decipherers of the Prussian Foreign Office had been assigned it for their quarters:

"Have those fellows yet gone to bed?"

And even as he queried he knew by the peculiar smile upon the faces of Captain von Uslar and his subaltern, that the scene in the dining-room was repeated here. He said with a shrug:

"Oh, well!... They had my permission to make a night of it. One would like to be sure, though, that there are no candles to upset!"

The junior officer moved to the library door and opened it, setting free a puff of hot air laden with wine fumes, and a chorus of snores ranging from piping alto to deep bass. Nothing could be seen except the vague outlines of prostrate bodies, revealed by a pale gleam of moonlight that made its way down the chimney and shone upon the dead ashes of the hearth.

"Shall I wake anybody?" queried the lieutenant's look. The Minister made a sign in the negative, bade a pleasant good night to the two officers, and withdrew, shutting the glass door. He quitted the drawing-room, went into the hall, tried the fastenings of the hall door, and crossed to the hatchway under the main staircase that led to the kitchen quarters. A gas jet was flaring in a draught at the bottom of the staircase. He went down, regulated the light as he passed to a safer volume, and tried the handle of the door leading to what had been a housekeeper's parlor, and was now used by the house steward and the Chancery attendants as an upper servants' hall. A gasalier of flaring jets revealed five persons in here, wrapped in the heavy sleep of drunkenness. One, the house steward, snored, recumbent on a sofa; Grams and Engelberg, those monuments of rigid respectability, reposed with their heads and shoulders resting on the table, appropriately decorated with empty bottles and upset glass beakers, and in the center of which stood a great china bowl.

The Minister peeped into this vessel curiously. Apples stuck with cloves, and cinnamon sticks left high and dry at the bowl bottom testified to the Yuletide correctness of the punch, brewed by the skilled hand of the Foreign Office cook. He, the artist responsible for the dinner which had astonished the three Bavarian plenipotentiaries, leaned back, slumbering profoundly in a high-backed armchair. A china pipe, gayly tasseled and painted, drooped from one side of his relaxed mouth. His feet rested upon the sprawling back of the gigantic Niederstedt, who had gone to sleep upon a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove. His huge right hand still grasped an empty bottle that had contained his favorite Old Nordhausen. He opened one eye as the Minister stooped to inspect him--uttered a stertorous snort, and relapsed again into his hoggish Nirvana, leaving the Minister, as he deliberately turned out the gas and quitted the steward's room, to realize that, save himself, the two officers smoking in the winter garden, and the women presumably sleeping on the second floor, the house whose outer precincts were so vigilantly guarded, did not contain a sober head.

"Well, well! A bout of drunkenness may well be condoned in the servants when the master himself gave the signal for revelry!"

He told himself so, smiling as he made the round of the basement house doors. Nothing had disturbed his equanimity saving the discovery that Niederstedt was incapable of speech or movement. For with his strange characteristic mingling of audacity and caution, the Minister, while leaving Mademoiselle de Bayard practically free within the house limits, had insured by private orders that the giant East Prussian should sleep henceforth outside his master's bedroom door.

Again, as the master's long strides carried him upstairs to the hall again, and he took his bedroom candle from the row on the Empire console, he knew a moment of inward f rat. There was nobody to help him undress, and put away his clothes. Wherever Fate and the Intendant General had assigned the Minister's sleeping quarters, the deft Grans, or the attentive Engelberg had always appeared--or, failing these, the stolid Niederstedt--to render these and other personal services, the lack of which after long use is keenly felt.

Is was a hellish nuisance to a middle-aged man to have to get himself out of his full-dress uniform. One grew hot at the mere thought of unfastening the shoulder belt and sword belt, collar hooks, buckles, swivels, and so on. Last, but not least, the final wrestle with the polished, spurred jack boots....

"God be thanked, I am not wearing the cuirass!" he said to himself devoutly, as he laid hand upon his bedroom door.