It was given to William John Tomlinson to rouse the venomous reptile
that lay hidden in this man out of his wintry torpor. A bitter oath
broke from him as he read the message. He tore the flimsy scrawled
paper and the blue envelope into a dozen pieces, and scrunched them in
his small neat hand before he threw the lump of paper on the Persian
hearthrug, and spat upon it with another oath, and ground it under his
spurred heel.
Not one of those about him had ever seen him so moved. De Morny lifted
his eyebrows in C, de Fleury and Persigny looked at each other in
consternation, St. Arnaud’s jaw dropped; he gulped, staring at his
master with bulging eyes, as Monseigneur strove before them, in the
strange emotion that possessed him, wrestling with something that
plucked at his muscles and jerked his limbs, and contorted his heavy
features, and wrenched the ugly jaw that the drooping mustache and the
thick chin-tuft tried to hide, to the right and left as though the man
had been a figure of wood and wires worked by some devil at play.
“The Mayor,...” he croaked, after a dumb struggle for speech. “The
Chief Magistrate of Dover congratulates the Chief Magistrate of Paris.
Damnably amusing!... Good!--very good!”
His laugh was a snapping bark, like the sound made by a dog in rabies.
He went on, heedless of the faces gathered about him, speaking, not
to them, but to that other hidden self of his; the being who dwelt
behind the dough-colored mask, and looked through the narrow eye-slits,
guessed at, but never before seen:
“You comprehend, Madame of England and that sausage of Saxe-Coburg
Saalfeld, her Consort, think it beneath their exalted dignity to
bandy courtesies with me.... Me, the out-at-elbows refugee, the shady
character--the needy Prince-Pretender--admitted upon sufferance to
West of London Clubs; exhibited as a curiosity in the drawing-rooms
of English Society--stared at as some cow-worshiping jewel-hung Hindu
Rajah, or raw-meat-eating Abyssinian King.” He clenched his pretty hand
and went on, carried away by the tide of bitter memories:
“One day, when I visited the Zoological Garden in their Regent’s Park,
I saw something that I shall not forget. A great hooded snake of the
cobra species--they called it a hamadryad--had just been brought up
from the East India Docks. When he found himself a prisoner in his
iron-framed, plate-glass cage, he reared himself up in magnificent
fury. His forked tongue quivered between his frothing jaws; he
vibrated, poised upon his lower coils; struck again and again--and
did nothing but bruise himself. Something that he could not break--a
barrier adamantine and invisible, lay between him and the staring human
faces he so hated. The clear jets of deadly venom that he spurted in
his efforts to reach them trickled harmlessly down the glass....”
He went on:
“I saw myself at Ham when I looked at that creature in its loneliness
and impotence, surrounded by the keepers who jeered and mocked....
Death in its fangs and death in its heart, and that barrier of glass
between.... There were workmen with tools among those who stared at
him. One shattering blow of a pick, and he would have been free--that
living Terror, to kill, and kill, and kill!...”
He looked about him, and said, with his affected mildness:
“The pick-blow that cracks the glass of my cage will be the _coup
d’État_, but not until I am Emperor of France will the barrier be done
away with.... Do you know what Queen Victoria once said of me to Lady
Stratclyffe? ‘_My dear, let me beg of you not to mention M. Bonaparte
before Albert. He considers him hardly a person to be spoken of--not
at all a person to know! And yet how can one deny him some measure of
respect and consideration--as a near relative of Napoleon the Great._’”
He had another struggle with his rending devil, and said, when he had
found his speech again:
“‘Great!’ Was he so great, that man for whose sake Victoria would
accord me ‘respect and consideration’? True, he humbled Emperors,
browbeat and bullied Kings.... He kicked the board of Europe, and
armies were jumbled in confusion. His screaming eagles carried panic,
and terror, and devastation as far as the Pyramids. The East bowed her
jeweled forehead in the dust before him--a nation of beef-fed islanders
put him to the rout!”
His eyes, wide open now and glazed, looked upon the men who listened,
unseeing as the eyes of a somnambulist. He said in that voice that was
a croak:
“And he died, the prisoner and slave of England. Before I die, England
shall be mine!”
* * * * *
Perhaps he fancied that he detected a faint, supercilious sneer upon
the face of de Morny. For he turned upon the Count, and said, narrowing
his eyelids, and smiling in a menacing way:
“You, my brother, take this assertion as a piece of boasting. Well, I
am content that you should regard it so. Members of Christ’s family
held in contempt His powers of prophecy. Nevertheless, Jerusalem fell,
and the Temple was leveled with the dust.”
“By my faith!” said de Morny, shrugging his thin wide shoulders. “A
parallel that!”
“A parallel, as you say,” returned Monseigneur, who had made the
astonishing comparison with the coolest effrontery. “Now, if you will
give me pen, ink, and paper, I will write the answer to this letter
from Belgrave Square.”
They supplied him with these things, and he wrote, in his pointed
spidery hand, stooping over the desk of an inlaid ivory escritoire--a
dainty thing whose drawers and pigeon-holes had contained the political
correspondence of Queen Marie Antoinette and the love-letters of
amorous Josephine:
“_Tell my Lord that I carry out my programme. Upon the morning of the
second of December, at a quarter-past six punctually, I strike the
decisive blow._”
He signed the sheet with his initials, folded and slipped it in an
envelope, and motioned to de Morny to prepare the wax to receive his
signet. While the red drops were falling on the paper, like gouts of
thick blood, he said, with his smile:
“It may be that this second of December will prove to be my eighteenth
Brumaire.”
And when Persigny inquired to which of the official messengers the
letter should be entrusted for conveyance to London, he replied:
“To none of them. An aide-de-camp will attract less notice. And he must
be a mere junior, an unimportant person whom nobody will be likely to
follow or molest.”
An ugly salacious humor curved his pasty cheeks and twitched at his
nostrils as he went on:
“Suppose we send Dunoisse? Madame de Roux adores him, but there are
occasions upon which she would find it more convenient to adore him
from a distance. One can easily comprehend that!”
He added, as his merry men roared with laughter:
“It is decided, then. Colonel Dunoisse shall be our messenger. Pray
touch the bell, M. de St. Arnaud.”
A moment later the band of the --th Hussars crashed magnificently
into the opening bars of “_Partant Pour La Syrie_,” and Monseigneur,
imperturbable and gracious as ever, was smiling on the “damnable
rabble” crowding to bask in the rays of their midnight-risen sun. And
beyond the big gilded gates of the little palace Paris buzzed and
roared like an angry beehive into which some mischief-loving urchin has
poked a stick.