Part 61

It swung back, and then his vexation passed from him. On a little table near the hearthside, where yet some embers of a fire glowed redly, stood a little gayly-caparisoned Christmas tree. Under its branches, adorned with red-and-white tapers as yet unlighted, lay the gifts that came from home.

He crossed the room in two long steps and stood smiling before the little fir tree. The purplish redness died out of his great cheeks and jowl, the congested veins no longer stood out like ropes upon his throat and temples. The great eyes that had blazed with Satanic pride softened into tenderness, as he picked up the gifts one by one and looked at them.

"From His Daughter to Papachen," said an embroidered tobacco pouch. "From Bill" and "From Herbert" a gold fusee box and a smoker's knife were respectively labeled. "From thy wife Johanna" was written on a slip of paper attached to the case that contained a handsome cup of Tula ware. He turned the cup in his hands many times before he returned it to its outer husk. He said fondly, familiarly, as though the giver were standing beside him:

"Little thou carest, thou good heart!--whether thou art wife to a Chancellor of the North German Confederation, or the Chancellor of the German Empire. One object in life thou hast--and that is to get the old man home again!" After a moment he added, pitching the Bavarian Treaty on the center table, unhooking and removing his sword belt, and throwing it on the couch: "Babel must be bombarded, or thou wilt not be pleased with me ... am I not a good pupil, to have learned my lesson so well?"

The shoulder belt came off with a slight degree of twisting and fumbling. He laid it aside, and moved to the slaving glass, and by its aid unfastened from his collar swivel the Iron Cross. "Good!" he commented, and laid it on top of a dispatch box on the center table. Then he began slowly and methodically to unfasten the other Orders from his breast. As he pricked a finger with the pin of one in wrenching at it angrily, it occurred to him that it would have been perfectly feasible to have removed his dress tunic with all its decorations, and this discovery stung him to wrath.

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_--am I, then, such a sheep's head?" he said angrily to himself. Something dropped upon the floor with a tinkle and rolled away merrily under a chair, leaving its owner with the thick silver pin that had secured it gripped between his finger and thumb. It was the medallion bestowed upon him in '42 for an act of gallantry, the obverse a shield of silver on a circle, bearing a red-enameled Prussian eagle, and on the reverse the inscription: "_Für Rettung aus Gefahr_."

The pin remained in his hand. Cursing his own clumsiness, he took the lighted candle he had placed upon the center table upon entering, and stooped to recover the evasive prize. Both hands were required for the task, that was quickly apparent. Half unconsciously he reverted to a habit for which his wife had often playfully scolded him--nipped the broken silver pin between his teeth and bent down to resume his search upon the floor.

As he stooped, the detonation of a driving charge and the deafening roar and shriek of a huge shell were followed by an ear-splitting explosion. His practiced ear told him. that the shell had been fired from the Fortress of St. Valérien. Half a dozen others followed in rapid succession. No alarm trumpet sounded. Dogs barked, near and far, the echoes of the cannonade rattled among the woods and high grounds, then died out. He said to himself: "Those sugar plums have done damage somewhere near St. Germain.... Now, then, where is this runaway medal?"

As he queried, a sudden spasm of the windpipe shot him to the perpendicular. He coughed and hawked as he had never done before. With a hand upon his side, he coughed, straining horribly. With streaming, starting eyes he coughed, clutching at his throat.

And then, with a sudden stab of pain beneath the uvula and a strangling access of coughing, he realized that a familiar home prediction had been fulfilled:

"_Otto, you will certainly swallow that pin!..._"

He could almost hear the voice of his wife speaking. How absurd! he thought, and laughed; and the agony in his lacerated gullet brought on a fit of choking worse than those that had gone before. He seized the candle and held it to his face before the shaving mirror, opening his powerful jaws to their widest and straining his eyes that were too blind with tears to see his own swollen, discolored features. He spat furiously, ejecting showers of saliva streaked with blood, but not the obstacle that was choking him.... He thrust his hand into his mouth, and groped as far down his throat as his fingers could reach--all to no avail....

"_Help!..._"

He gasped the word, realizing that if no help came, he was a dead man. And he seized the bell rope and rang furiously, until the rope came down in his hand as had that of the reception-room a day or so previously, followed by a long trail of rusty wire that, when tugged, evoked no metal clang below.

"Help! For the love of God!" he croaked, and whirling vertigo seized him. Whooping with a dreadful croupy intake, he tripped over a footstool, and fell upon his hands and knees, and struggled up again in a last strangling effort, and staggered to the door.

The door handle seemed to stick, or could it be that his grasp had lost its power? In the light of the gas and his yet flaring candle, he looked at his knuckles and saw that they were turning blackish blue.... A wave of blackness rose and fell, swamping consciousness. He emerged from drowning waters, and found himself upon the landing, gripping some round object that proved to be the wrenched-off door handle, and moaning in the whisper that he thought a shout:

"Help, help, help!..."

Bismarck, the man whom Kings and Emperors meant when they spoke of Prussia--the great Minister who had made three Wars--was dying. Would no one come? Not one of those who loved the man would ever know the true story of his sordid, solitary ending.... Not one of those who hated him but would hear every ugly detail of it, and recount it for others, smiling at its grim, grotesque absurdity....

Choked by a pin!... An end rather less noble for a great Chancellor than being run over by a donkey cart or smothered in a midden pit full of liquid manure....

Someone was groaning horribly, close beside him. Deep ruckling, gasping groans with a rattle and a catch midway. Were they his own death groans? What was this? The walls were melting and vanishing. Clear, vivid, definite, there unrolled before his filming eyes a picture of Varzin, his Pomeranian country home. It was Spring. The dark pines about the house shone as though newly varnished. The larches were caparisoned with tassels of pale green. The blue sky was vivid as Persian turquoise. He saw his daughter in a white dress step out from the low wide porch and stand smiling upon the terrace. She had a bunch of primroses in her belt, and his great hound Tyras had followed her and was rubbing his great head against her sleeve.

"Dying!" he tried to say to her. "Help your father!" ... But it seemed to him that he uttered nothing but a groan. There was a thundering in his ears like the noise of a field battery. His great bulk reeled toward her.... He pitched forward and fell heavily....

He heard a scared voice crying: "Monseigneur!..." and knew no more.

LXXVI

Juliette had not gone to bed, this snowy night of the Noël. She had said her Rosary and waited until the Christmas carillon. Then she knelt and prayed for her own pardon, for light and guidance, for a blessing upon those living friends she held most dear, for the souls of the beloved departed. And then she had waited, pacing solitary in her bedroom or sitting by her fire, for the sound of Breagh's return.

Madame Potier had gone to the Midnight Mass at the Cathedral. There would be crowds of communicants--she might not reach home before three. And in her absence had Juliette wished to sleep, sleep would have been banished by the sounds of revelry going on in the regions belowstairs.

Those first shouts for the Kaiser had been followed by others for the Chancellor. Even in her remote eyrie she could hear the clinking of glasses and the popping of corks. Then after a wild outburst of cheering she had seen, peeping between the frost flowers on her window into the snowy, moonlit garden, the great figure in the white Cuirassier cloak move down the path between the snow-laden trees.

She was possessed by a great sense of loneliness, and a vague unreal sensation of living somebody else's life, and not the life proper of Juliette Bayard. She locked her door and built up the fire to a cheerful hearth blaze, and sat upon the rug in her white dressing gown, combing and brushing her glorious hair.

Never again need those superb waves of jet-black spun silk be confined in the chenille net of Madame Charles Tessier. One could be charming if one chose--there was no grim reason for being ugly, thought Mademoiselle, as she brushed and brushed....

What was that?

So strange a sound from below that she dropped comb and hairbrush and sprang to her feet quivering.... She had heard such a groan uttered when the lance of the Uhlan had plunged through the body of my Cousin Boisset....

Again! ... the sound of a door thrust violently open. Heavy footsteps thudded on the gaslit landing of the next floor, and a muffled voice cried out as though for help.

A man's voice.... Again it cried. No voice sounded in answer. She unlocked her door, and set her foot upon the stairs.

A few steps down.... Then she saw him, the tottering giant with the distorted, blue face, and the open mouth that trickled with saliva and blood. What had befallen Juliette's enemy and France's pitiless oppressor? His huge staring eyes were fixed on her. Tears rolled from them as the deep groans issued from his gaping mouth and his broad chest heaved and labored vainly for air.

"_Choking! Help!_" his gesture seemed to say to her, and a terrible shudder convulsed her as the huge body crashed down prone at her feet.

With a strange mingling of pity and aversion she knelt down beside him and looked at him closely by the light of the flaring gas jet that illuminated the landing and stairs.

He had turned a little in falling. His blackening face and staring, agonized eyes spoke to his desperate condition.... What was to be done?... The obstruction in the throat must be removed somehow.... She rose up and went into the empty room upon her left hand, and felt in the darkness for the bell. There was none. The bell rope had been pulled down by the hand of the Minister, for this was the torture chamber, where M. Thiers underwent his periodical ordeal of thumbscrew and rack.

Air.... He must have fresh air. She desperately flung both the windows open, admitting a gush of piercing cold. He still groaned, but more faintly. The man was dying. Was not this the Judgment of Heaven?

In the hour of his triumph the sword had fallen. France would be saved--there would be no bombardment of Paris if the enemy were to die to-night. This she told herself, standing in the sharp draught from the open windows, and knew a thrill of intolerable triumph, thinking:

"Our Lord has delivered him into hands as weak as mine!"

_Ting!..._

Her heart leaped and stood still. She looked breathlessly from the window. Along the middle of the snowy Rue de Provence, where pedestrians must walk to avoid the dangers of the frozen sideways, a lantern moved, carried by a squat, muffled shape. A taller figure followed, moving steadily.

_Ting-ting-ting!..._

A shock and thrill of mingled awe and terror passed through her. To some dying Catholic, saint or sinner, in the dawn of this day of the Christ-birth, the Body of the Virgin-born was being conveyed.... Was it not to aid a soul in dire temptation--two souls, it might be--that He had bidden His minister pass this way?

She bent the knee and made the Sign of the Cross, trembling, then rose and sped back to the suffocating man. With a strength that she could not have believed herself possessed of, she raised his discolored head upon her lap.... His great jaws were wide open. She thrust the tiny hand within them. Shuddering, sickening, she probed with her slender fingers, thrusting them down into the contracting, gulping throat.

Something bright projected beneath the swollen uvula, wedged firmly into the membrane, blocking the orifice of the trachea. She nipped the projecting end in the little fingers and pulled. It yielded. He gave a gulp of relief. As the big teeth snapped together, she plucked the little hand from peril, bringing with it the broken silver pin.

LXXVII

He was instantly, tremendously sick, as an overeaten ogre might have been in an Eastern story. When he had finished vomiting, he heaved up his huge, shuddering bulk. She put her slight shoulder under the groping hand, and guided him. With this slight aid he reached his room. The couch stood drawn forward at an angle toward the fireplace. He staggered to it, let himself drop upon it, and said, in a groan:

"Drink!..."

He pointed to the night stand at his bedside. When she poured from the jug that stood there into the glass and brought it to him, he gulped the contents greedily.

"Barley water ... good for the throat!" he gasped, giving the glass back. She filled it again, and again he emptied it.

His sweat-dabbled face was regaining a more natural color. She went to the washstand, filled a small shaving basin with cold water from the hand jug, and brought it with a fine clean towel to his side. She dipped the towel in the water and laved his face and forehead. That he experienced relief and refreshment from this she saw by the placid air with which he submitted, leaning his head back against the pillowed sofa end, and closing his eyes.

She dried his face, and suddenly the great eyes opened. The voice of the Chancellor said:

"There.... That will do!"

From the passive victim he had suddenly reverted to the master; potent--authoritative....

"Go to bed, Mademoiselle de Bayard, and sleep," he told her. "I am comfortable ... I shall do well enough!"

She replaced the basin and towel in silence, bent her head to the figure sitting upright on the sofa, and moved noiselessly to the door. As she touched the broken handle, he said to her abruptly:

"You will be silent upon the subject of to-night's--misadventure?..."

She answered:

"I will be silent, Monseigneur!"

He said, lifting a finger to detain her yet another instant:

"Do not err in supposing me ungrateful. I know very well that you have saved my life!"

A shudder passed through her slight figure. She averted her eyes, remembering.... He finished:

"I lunch with the King at the Prefecture to-morrow. I will see you before I leave the house."

"As you will, Monseigneur!"

He added with something like a twinkle:

"With regard to all that ... _débris_ upon the landing ... it will not be the first time Niederstedt has been guilty in that way. Good night, Mademoiselle--or, rather, good morning.... Hark! Was not that the bell of the house door?"

"I--am not sure, Monseigneur!"' she said, in hesitation, for so ragged and weakly a peal had been evolved by the ringer that the sound might have passed unnoticed by ears less keen than his.

"They are all asleep or drunk belowstairs!" He began to raise himself stiffly from the sofa. "I will go down...."

"No; I will go!" she said.

And she left the room. He let himself sink back on the sofa. "_Grosser Gott!_" he said to himself. "How near a thing! ... And that the little Fury should have stopped the brand from quenching.... Well, now, at this rate, I may live another thirty years. Not that I should find much zest in a prolonged spell of power and authority. The King-Emperor in the ordinary course must die before long. My master in that event would be a good-natured booby, who in assuming the supreme dignities of Imperial authority would value the stage setting beyond anything else!"

He quoted with acerbity increased by recent suffering:

"'Pomp and solemnity' ... 'The ancient Crown of Charlemagne from Vienna' ... 'I shall write to my wife to-night' ... Pray do!... And while Your Royal Highness is about it you had better consult little Prince William, who would probably give you as valuable advice."

His thoughts reverted to the fair-haired, puny-limbed eleven-year-old urchin in kilt and plaid of Royal Stuart tartans.... "Now," said he, "what sort of a future Emperor may be enclosed in that husk?... That the boy has a crippled left arm, and a capital set of sharp teeth, which he uses on the calves of his Military Governor and tutors, is practically all I know of him.... Come in!"

He had been so lost in thought as to miss the sound of chains undone and bolts drawn back, though he had shivered unconsciously as the opening of the hall door had admitted a volume of fresh, piercing air to the heated house. Now he reared himself upright upon the sofa, stared for a moment at the figure that responded to his gruff "Come in!" and burst into an irresistible laugh.

"Quite right, Mr. Breagh!" he said, in his clear and fluent English. "I told you to come up to me at whatever hour you might get back. But I forgot that you would naturally visit Madame de Bayard in the costume proper to Jean Jacques Potier, to whom I suppose that extraordinary overcoat and the wolfskin cap must have belonged. Frankly, I did not recognize you.... The condition of your clothes, and that bandage on your forehead are responsible, more than my lapse of memory. You certainly look rather shaken. Let me hope you have sustained no serious hurt?"

P. C. Breagh grinned mirthlessly, and looked ruefully down at his snowy boots and trousers, from which the melting snow was beginning to drip in little rills upon the carpeted floor. By the light of the two gas lamps depending above the table, it could be seen that the gory bandage surmounting his pale face had been applied by an experienced hand. He needed no immediate surgical aid. But his blue lips and drawn and pallid features betrayed him exhausted. The Minister, noting this, pointed to a chair.

"Sit down," he said, "and rest before you speak! There is brandy in that flask that stands upon the bureau.... But something hot would be better for you--that is what you most need."

There was a sound upon the landing ... a faint tap upon the door panel.

"See who it is!" said the Chancellor.

As Breagh rose, the door opened, wide enough to admit a little tray bearing two steaming coffee cups.

"Capital!" said His Excellency, addressing the unseen cup-bearer. "Now, that I call an excellent thought!"

He took a cup from the tray Breagh offered, bidding him:

"Sit down and drink the other. I should have got none except for you!" When the steaming cup was empty, "Proceed," he said, ignoring the gray daylight outlining the curtain poles and filtering between the drawn curtains.

"At what hour did you get to Maisons Lafitte? For I presume you did get there?"

P. C. Breagh said:

"I got there at about two o'clock.... I had an appointment at the Cathedral, otherwise I should have started before."

"I hope she was pretty!" said the Minister, smiling.

P. C. Breagh went on, as though he had not heard:

"The snow was beginning to freeze. It was not such bad walking, but that hill of St. Germain was a winder, and in the Forest I lost my way.... If a party of men--peasants in sheepskin caps and jackets--forest keepers possibly--had not turned out of an avenue and kept marching ahead, I might never have got as far as the Seine road...."

"The men were marching, and not walking," commented the Minister, and his great brows scowled, and his bulldog jowl hardened as he added: "And they carried guns, or you would not have taken them for keepers.... I have no doubt that they were _Francs-tireurs_."

"I lost them where the road winds by the Seine," P. C. Breagh continued. "And then I had a real stroke of luck. I came across a hack cab from Versailles at a regular standstill. The snow had balled in the wretched horse's feet, and the driver was as drunk as David's sow. The fare was asleep inside, but he woke as I opened the cab door and flashed one of the lamps in his face, and then he said"--the narrator unconsciously gave the tone and accent of the Doctor--"'By the piper that played before Moses, my boyo! I was dreaming of you, and here you are.'"

The Minister broke in:

"That man was the English correspondent of _The Times_ newspaper. He is of the same surname, though no relative of Odo Russell, the English Envoy, who has been sent out here upon a Mission to our German Court.... Ill-natured diplomatists whisper that Great Britain is jealous of the great successes of Prussia, and does not welcome the prospect of a United Imperial Germany. _Au fond_, we Germans have a kind of sentimental regard for your nation. She is an offshoot of the great Germanic stem--it is impossible that we should not regard her as nearer to us than others.... Though, should we ever seriously quarrel, it may be found that the bitterest variance may exist between those of the same blood.... And so you have never confided to your friend the secret of your presence in Versailles! Reticence in the young is an unusual gift. Possibly he gave you a lift in his vehicle?"

"----Till the unlucky Rosinante gave out," acquiesced Breagh, "and we had to leave her with her Jehu at the wreck of the railway station, and then the Doctor stopped at the diggings of the friends he was on the way to look up, a half squadron of Barnekow's Hussars who are quartered in a deserted chateau. They gave me some sandwiches and beer, and then I went on by myself to the Villa Laon where Madame de Bayard"--he stopped and added in a low voice--"used to live."

Something in the tone attracted the attention of the Chancellor. He repeated:

"Used to.... Does she not, then, live there now? Has she gone with M. de Straz--the pair of love birds together?..."

Said P. C. Breagh, seized with a shudder that knocked his knees together, and speaking in a low voice:

"I--I beg of Your Excellency to spare her your irony.... Madame de Bayard is dead!"

"So!..."

The Minister's ejaculation was followed by the order:

"Now the details!... Has she died naturally, or by accident--or by a murderer's hand?"

P. C. Breagh said, lowering his voice apprehensively:

"She was killed by a shell. There was a bombardment from Mont Valérien.... It broke out at about a quarter past two this morning--just as I reached the Villa Laon...."

"Ah! now I understand how you got that love token on your forehead!" said the Minister.

Breagh nodded, and wiped his wet forehead with a blood-stained handkerchief, and shuddered and went on:

"Nobody had gone to bed when I got to the villa. The blinds of what I could see was a dining-room were drawn up and the curtains all drawn back. The room was brilliantly lighted, lots of mirrors and crystal girandoles. It was like a scene on the stage, looking at it from the snowy garden. Shin-deep in snow, because the paths had not been cleared.... You could not tell where the paths were, in fact, so I steered my course by the big shining window. Then I saw him, moving before me----"

Queried His Excellency:

"By him, you mean whom?..."

"A man," said P. C. Breagh, "whom I saw moving along before me, taking cover behind snowy bushes and clumps of frosted prairie grass. When he stood up, I saw that he was short in figure and had immensely broad shoulders. I was quite sure that I had seen the fellow before. In fact----"