He was so strangely altered, aged, bleached and wasted, that for some
moments Sire my Friend and the other owners of the curled and made-up
heads that had pivoted round upon his entrance regarded him in the
silence that is born of dismay. The color of old wax, or of a corpse
some days dead, an atmosphere of such chilly isolation surrounded
this pale spectral figure, that even de Moray, that cool smiling
skeptic, knew the shudder of superstitious terror, and felt his thin
hair stiffen on his scalp. A worn and shabby Staff uniform of the
date of the Presidency hung in folds upon the intruder’s lean and
stooping body. His black eyes burned in caves hollowed by protracted
mental labors and immense physical exertions. His black hair, long
uncut, and mingled with streaks and patches of white, hung in tangled
elf-locks to his tarnished epaulets, and drooped in a heavy matted
plume upon his brow. To the gaunt hollows beneath his haunted eyes he
was raggedly bearded with this piebald mixture. And as he stood before
them, intermittent gusts of fever seized and shook him, until his
teeth chattered audibly, and his bones seemed to rattle in his baggy,
withered skin. As, in one of these gusts, he coughed, and pressed to
his parched lips a yellowed cambric handkerchief that was presently
bloodstained, de Fleury--reassured by this incontestable proof of
mortality--took courage and called him by his name:
“Dunoisse!”
“Dunoisse!... A thousand welcomes, _mon cher_ General!” Sire my Friend,
instantly assuming his urbane and benignant air, stepped towards the
shabby scarecrow with graciously extended hand. But the scarecrow
raised its own, and waved Imperial Majesty back with a gesture so
expressive of warning, if not of menace, that the action sent a
shudder through its witnesses. Again they doubted if this were not
some ghostly visitant from the world that is beyond the grave.... And
again the hacking, tearing cough came to convince them that this was no
spirit, but merely a dying man.
Said Sire my Friend, after that slight pause of consternation:
“My good Dunoisse, you have dropped on us--literally from the heavens.
As a fact, we had heard on excellent authority that you were--ill--and
that the pleasure of welcoming you must be--indefinitely deferred.
Upon this account excuse what may strike you as lack of cordiality
in our greeting!” He added, and his growing confidence permitted an
outcrop of anger upon the smooth polish of his accents. “And explain to
us--the rules denying unknown officers access to the Emperor’s private
apartments being even more stringent than those which protected the
President from such intrusion--how you gained admittance here?”
For all answer, the shape he spoke to lifted its left hand, and showed,
hanging loosely on a wasted finger, a signet ring. Sire my Friend,
recognizing the token conferring upon his Equerry General, Private
Secretary, and Military Secretaries, access to his person at all hours,
shrugged his chagrin; and tapped his daintily-shod foot impatiently
upon the floor.
“Of course! Naturally! Pardon my forgetfulness!” he said urbanely.
“I myself bestowed that Open Sesame upon you, when your skill, and
intelligence, and ability prompted me to promote you to a confidential
post upon my Staff. And later--when my reliance in your discretion and
fidelity led me to place in your most able hands the task which you
have so superbly completed--you took the ring with you when you left
Paris for the East.” He added, discerning that the black eyes burning
in their shadowy caves glanced at the faces of his merry men with
doubtfulness:
“Have no fear! These trusted friends who shared with me the secret
of the intended _coup d’État_ participate in knowledge of this
later--measure of diplomacy.... You have arrived at the very moment
of disclosure.... Therefore speak out quite freely, my very good
Dunoisse!...”
Dunoisse opened his cracked lips, and said, in a voice so faint and
hollow that it might have answered from the sepulcher of Lazarus when
the Voice bade the dead come forth:
“I will speak out freely. To do so is my right. None can dispute it.”
He waited, gathering strength, clenching his fleshless hands, breathing
painfully; and a glistening upon his sunken parchment temples and the
burning patches of red upon his hollow cheeks betrayed the terrible
emotions that rent and tore the wasted body that housed a suffering
soul.
“I have spread your nets,” he said, in the voice that had lost
its clear, sharp ring, and was feeble, and flat, and broken.
“From the Balkans to the Pruth I have set your springes--dug your
pitfalls--sharpened your hidden stakes. I have put it in your power to
precipitate a crisis. To meet events and grapple Fate I used all the
strength and all the skill I had.”
He drew a shaken breath and went on:
“I have subsidized scores of men into this service--no man knowing his
neighbor for a fellow-conspirator--every man secretly bound by the
oath that is most sacred in his sight. Turks, Greeks, Tartars, Jews,
Armenians, Bulgarians, and Wallachs--all have been pledged not to give
aid to Russia, or England the Ally of Russia, in the great War that
was presently to be waged with France and the Ottoman Empire--over the
Debatable Ground....”
A rush of fever dyed his sallowness to dusky crimson. The heat that
radiated from his burning body struck upon the bodies of the other men.
“I served you,” he said, fixing his sunken, glittering eyes upon the
face of Imperial Majesty, “to the very gates of Death. Believing myself
to be dying, I placed--in the hands of two men who had sought me out
and found me--the original charts that proved my task completed, and
the tracings of those charts. One, at least, of my messengers could not
fail to reach you----”
De Morny said, pointing to the writing-table, where the squares of
shiny tracing-paper, covered with spidery diagrams and dotted lines
in red and blue and green and vari-colored inks, lay in the yellow
radiance cast by the green-shaded lamp:
“There are the proofs that one of your messengers did reach his
destination. We had been looking at those marvelous charts the moment
before you came in.”
De Morny, Duke and Peer of France, might have been a mouse squeaking
in a corner or one of the love-birds and wax-bills--dainty
feathered creatures for which Imperial Majesty possessed an amiable
_penchant_--twittering in its gilded window-cage. For Dunoisse neither
saw nor heard him, but folded his thin arms upon his hollow breast, and
spoke with his haggard eyes on the face of Sire my Friend.
“I came back to civilization to learn the truth of you. I was not
the keeper of your secret, the agent of your power, set to pit craft
against craft and insure victory by wise precaution!--I was your dupe,
your accomplice, and your tool. Judas! Oh, Judas!” said Dunoisse,
in a dry, fierce rustling whisper that was like the sirocco passing
through a field of withered maize-stalks. “How is it that I believed
you--knowing you besmeared with blood, and rotten to the soul with
deceits and falsehoods? How should _I_ not be among the number of those
you have flattered and swindled and betrayed?”
The silence of sickening consternation was on each of those who heard
him. Their crests of false curls drooped; the paint faded from their
faces under the lashing hail of his words. They were crimson or leaden
or sea-green according to their various temperaments--the complexion of
Sire my Friend having undergone this last and most unbecoming change.
And Dunoisse went on speaking, almost without a gesture, as a man whose
bodily weakness compelled economy of breath and action.
“I was to have had a great reward of you for my services. One million
one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, to be definite! Keep your
stolen money! Could I buy back self-respect with the price of blood?
As for you, you have won your Empire--have brought about the War you
schemed and plotted for; you will take the field with Turkey and your
Ally of England, shoulder to shoulder--side by side!... Ah!--you read
Machiavelli at the Fortress of Ham to good purpose!... You grew more
than violets upon the ramparts, Monseigneur! You matured plans for
revenge.... And you will have your honeyed vengeance,” said Dunoisse,
in that distinct, rasping whisper. “And gall will mingle with the
sweetness as you suck it. For those old associates of yours--those
men of the Reform and Carlton Clubs of London--will say of you: ‘By
God!--this Emperor of France is a damned scoundrel!’ And, by God!--they
will be right!”
The sentence, spoken in English, cut like a tandem-whip. As it hissed
through the stagnant, perfumed, tobacco-laden atmosphere of the room,
the speaker drew his sword. Sire my Friend recoiled and cried out at
the sharp hiss of the steel, and de Fleury, brave as a bulldog, sprang
before his master instantly. But Dunoisse only balanced the weapon a
moment with the deftness of a master of fence, ere, with an effort that
taxed his feebleness to the utmost, he snapped the tarnished steel
across his thin knee, and said, as he threw the pieces down clattering
at the dainty buckled feet of Imperial Majesty:
“My military oath of allegiance was to the President, not to the
Emperor. I will serve you no longer, be that understood! And--though
the work I have done has been fatally well done!--in so far as it be
possible, I will unmesh the net I have woven.... Therefore be warned,
Monseigneur!”
With this, as a man might shake off from his hand some venomous insect,
he dropped the loosely-fitting signet ring upon the carpet, ground
it with a sudden, savage impulse underneath his heel, and went out,
leaving them staring and short of breath.
A moment later, Sire my Friend, whose complexion of sea-green had
suffered change to a congested purple, staggered and clutched at
nothing, and fell down frothing in an epileptic fit.
By the advice of Persigny--who had seen him before in that pitiable
condition--they moved the furniture away from his vicinity, and left
his devil to use him at its will. And presently he came to, staring and
shuddering, with a bitten glove between his teeth; and was very feeble
and exhausted, and full of fears lest the Empress had seen him thus
afflicted. But by-and-by, when reassured, and restored, and renovated,
he was able to interview the Chief of his Secret Police, and give
orders for an arrest....
He was peculiarly benevolent, urbane and smiling, an hour later, when,
to the united strains of “God Save the Queen” and “_Partant Pour La
Syrie_,” he entered the fairyland of blue-and-white striped awnings,
blue carpets, gold-tasseled hangings of pink satin, and elfin grottos
of green gauze, full of palms and hot-house roses, illuminated
with pink, blue and yellow Chinese lights. Leading the beautiful
Empress--who rested her gloved hand on the happy arm of the Duke of
Bambridge--followed by the French and British Commanders-in-Chief, with
their Staffs, his brothers and his uncle, he looked--or might have with
the addition of a few more inches--every inch an Emperor.
And not only an Emperor, said the Imperial Press Organs--a
philanthropic lover of mankind, who--supported by Great Britain, the
nursing-mother of infant nations--was about to carry out a war in the
cause of Freedom, Justice, and the Rights of Man against Irresponsible
Despotism.
Amidst the general joyousness, the depression of de Morny--that usually
light-hearted cynic--was curiously apparent. Lord Dalgan noticed this,
and commented upon it in his exquisite, polished French:
“By my faith, Monseigneur!” returned de Morny, in the English language,
“I cannot deny it, I am confoundedly hipped to-night! Absolutely, I am
like the Princess in the Suabian fairy legend--there is a rose-leaf
under my twenty-ninth feather-bed. Why? I am envious--absolutely
envious! I have seen a poor man throw away one million one hundred and
twenty-five thousand francs for the privilege of enjoying a luxury that
I, who am a rich man, cannot afford.”
“Really! And what is that costly form of indulgence?” asked my Lord.
De Morny answered, with a curious smile on that well-bred, rakish face
of his:
“The luxury of telling the truth!”
* * * * *
He could not afford it, though he would have liked it.... It was not
yet convenient to break with Sire my Friend....
* * * * *
And so the Monster Ball spun and whirled itself out, dancing becoming
public after the departure of the Imperial Party and their guests.
At three in the morning when even young and handsome faces looked
fagged, and old ones witchlike and ghastly; when the real flowers were
faded, and the imitation ones dusty and limp; when the elfin grottos
were revealed as garish shams which no respectable fairy would have
dreamed of being seen in--when the innumerable colored lanterns hung
from trees and twinkling amongst shrubberies looked pale and mean
and sickly in the light of coming day; a prison-van, bolted on a
railway-truck--having a carriage containing an Imperial aide-de-camp
and two Commissaries of Police in front of it, and another full of
gendarmerie behind it--was being whirled by a special engine into the
Northern Department of the Somme.
At the station where the van was unbolted from the railway-truck an
escort of Lancers waited; also a one-horse brougham, an open brake,
drawn by a pair; and a couple of spare horses. These being harnessed
to the van, the aide, after exchanging a sentence or two with the
commander of the cavalry escort, stepped into the brougham, followed
by the police-officers, who modestly took the front seat. Then at a
curt word of command the party put itself in motion, and clattered and
clinked and rolled away.
And presently the prison-van, with its wheeled and mounted guardians,
passed--with a challenge from a sentry and the giving of a countersign
at each--over two drawbridges, and clattered and rolled--the prisoner
judged by the damp chill and the hollow echo--under a heavy archway of
stone. And then, with the grinding of heavy iron wards in locks, and
screaming of solid iron bolts in stony groovings, the van came to a
halt; the steps were banged down, the door was opened; and the yawning
jailers who had traveled with the prisoner unlocked his narrow cell.
Dunoisse was invited to get out. He moved his cramped limbs with
difficulty, and descended the iron steps in the gay sunshine of an
April morning, which painted long blue shadows on a lofty wall centered
by a massive gateway with a square watch-tower, across the stones of a
flagged courtyard.
Two huge round towers flanked the south and west angles of the
courtyard. A block of buildings was upon his right hand that looked
like a Barracks. Another, smaller, on his left, was probably the
dwelling of the Commandant. A gray-haired, stout man in the undress
uniform of a field-officer of the Line came out of the house, saluted
the Imperial aide, and returned the salute of the officer of the
escort. He had a blue paper in his hand.
He said, addressing the prisoner after a brief colloquy with the
Imperial Staff officer:
“You will be confined here during the pleasure of the Emperor.”
Dunoisse knew that meant for life. He lifted his haggard eyes as he
asked the question:
“Where am I?”
The answer came:
“You are in the Fortress of Ham.”