WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY.
Ten days after the sudden departure of Madame Clemenceau from her
residence, a little before daybreak, Hedwig came down through the house
to draw up the blinds and open the windows. She carried a small
night-lamp and was not more than half awake.
It was the noise of the great invention which had turned the tranquil
group of villas and cherry orchards into a rendezvous for the singular
admixture of artilleries and scientific luminaries. The peaceful villa
entertained a selection of them nightly and it is astonishing how
heartily the military men ate and the professors drank, for the
enthusiasm had turned all heads.
Hedwig entered the fine old drawing-room where the symposium had been
held. It was a capacious room, not unlike an English baronial hall, the
doorways and windows were furnished with old Gobelin tapestry and the
heavy furniture was of mahogany, imported when France drew generously on
her colonies. The long table had been roughly cleared after supper by
the summary process of bundling all the plates up in the cloth. On it
had been replaced, for the final debate, drawings and models of the guns
considered absolute after the novel Clemenceau Cannon. On a
pedestal-pillar stood a large clock, representing, with figures at the
base, the forge of Vulcan; his Cyclops had hammered off six strokes a
little preceding the servant's entrance.
"A quarter past six," she said, yawning. "It will soon be light."
She drew the curtains and pulled the cord which caused the shade to roll
itself up in each of the three tall windows, before returning to the
table where she had left her now useless lamp. With a half-terrified
look, she began to arrange the pretty little cannon, exquisitely modeled
in nickel and bronze, and miniature shot, shell, chain-shot, etc., which
she handled with a curiosity rather instinctive than studied. In the
midst of her mechanically executed work, she was startled by a gentle
rapping on the plate-glass of a window. The sight of a face in the grey
morning glimmer startled her still more, but, luckily, she recognized
it. After hesitation, she crossed the room in surprise and unbolted the
two sashes, which opened like double doors.
"Hedwig!" said a woman's voice warily speaking, "open to me!"
The girl held the sashes widely apart, muttering:
"The mistress! why the mischief has she come back when we were getting
on so nicely."
But, letting the new-comer pass her, she tried to smoothe her face, and
don the smile as stereotyped in servants as in ballet-dancers, while she
continued the letting in of the daylight to gain time to recover her
countenance.
Césarine threw off a cloak, trimmed with fur, and more suitable for a
colder season, but it was a sable with a sprinkling of isolated white
hairs most peculiar and a present from her granduncle. She tottered and
seemed weak, for she had concluded that an affection of illness would
aid her re-entrance. As Hedwig extinguished the lamp, she sank into an
arm-chair. She curiously glanced around and inhaled with a questioning
flutter of the nostrils the lasting odor of cigars and Burgundy, which
the air retained. In this gloomy apartment where she had often sat
alone, sure not to be disturbed, the suggestion of uproarious jollity
hurt her dignity. A singular way to express sorrow and shame at the loss
of a wife by calling in boon companions! This did not seem like Felix
Clemenceau, sober and austere, thus to drown care in champagne.
"Are you alone, girl?" she inquired, looking round with a powerful
impression that the house had unexpected inmates.
"Yes. No one is up yet in the house," responded Hedwig, sharing her
mistress' uneasiness, though from a less indefinite reason; "at all
events, nobody has come down yet. But how did you see that it was I who
came in here before the shades were drawn up?"
"Well, I had made a little peep-hole to see what my husband and his
fellow conspirator were about, in the time before they shut themselves
up in their studio. But, if it is my turn to put questions," she went on
with some offended dignity, "how is it that the back door is bolted as
well as barred and that I have had to sneak in like a malefactor?"
"If you please, madame, it is the rule to be very careful about
fastening up, since you went away."
"Oh, on the principle of locking the stable-door when the steed--"
"Oh! they fear the loss of something which, without offense, I may say,
they esteem more highly than you."
Hedwig answered without even a little impertinence and the other did not
resent what sounded discourteous.
"Then they do not lock up to keep me out?" she questioned.
"It might be a little bit that way, too."
"It is a new habit. Did the master suggest it?"
"Not the master altogether, madame, but his partner."
"Eh! do you mean Antonino? Monsieur had already lifted him up to be his
associate, his confidant, his friend, to the exclusion of his lawful
friend and confidant, his wife--and now, does he make him his partner?"
"No, madame; though he has a good fat share in the enterprise. It is M.
Daniels who found the funds for the new company in which the master is
engaged, and he manages the house to leave the master all his time to go
on inventing and entertaining the grand folks we have to dinner."
"Mr. Daniels! not the old Jew who played that queer straight trumpet at
Munich--"
"Yes, the turkophone! Ah, he has no need to go about the music halls
now--he is, if not rich, the man who leads rich men by the nose, to come
and deposit their superfluous cash in our strong-box."
And she pointed fondly to a large iron-clamped coffin which occupied the
space between two of the windows. It was a novelty, for Césarine did not
recollect seeing it before. Continuing her survey, it seemed to her
that she noticed a different arrangement of the ornaments than when she
was queen here, and that the fresh flowers in the vases and two
palmettoes in urns were placed with a taste the German maid had never
shown.
"Let me see! this Jewish Orpheus had a daughter--"
"Exactly; she never leaves him. She has rooms within his just the same
as at our house in Munich. It appears that Jew parents trust their
pretty daughters no farther than they can see them. But I do not blame
M. Daniels," went on Hedwig, enthusiastically, "she is so lovely!"
Césarine rose partly, supporting herself with her hands on the arms of
the chair. Her eyes flashed like blue steel and her whole frame vibrated
with kindled rage.
"Do you mean to tell me, girl, that Mademoiselle Rebecca--as her name
went, I think--is now the mistress of my house?"
"In your absence," returned Hedwig, drawlingly, "somebody had to
preside, for neither the master, the old gentleman nor M. Antonino take
the head of the dinner-table with the best grace. It is true that our
guests are not very particular if the wine flows freely. I do not think
the young lady likes the position, for I know the old, be-spectacled
professors are as pestering with their attentions as the insolent
officers. She would have been so delighted at the relief promised by
your return that she would run to meet you and you would not have been
repulsed at the door."
"I daresay," replied Madame Clemenceau, frowning, and tapping the waxed
wood floor impatiently with her foot. "I did not care to announce my
return home with a flourish of trumpets. I was not averse to taking the
house by surprise, and seeing what a transformation has gone on since I
went away. Besides, it is desirable, not to say necessary, that I should
speak with you before seeing the others."
Hedwig pouted a little.
"You ought to have written to me, madame, as we were agreed, I thought;
I have been on tenderhooks because of your silence. I did not even guess
where you were."
"I did not wish it known for a while, and even then, it appears, I spoke
too soon," said Césarine gloomily.
"You did not want me to know, madame?" questioned the servant in
surprise and with a trace of suspicion.
"Not even you," and hanging her head, she sank into meditation, not
pleasant, to judge by her hopeless expression.
The servant, who had the phlegmatic brain of her people, was stupefied
for a little time, then, recovering some vivacity, she inquired
hesitatingly as though she was never at her ease with the subtle woman.
"Is madame going away without more than a glance around?"
"Why do you talk such nonsense?" queried her mistress, looking up
abruptly.
The girl intimated that the mysterious entrance portended secrecy to be
preserved. And, again, the lady had come without baggage, even so much
as in eloping from home. But Madame Clemenceau explained, with the most
natural air in the world, that she had walked over from the railway
station, where her impedimenta remained.
"Walked half a mile?" ejaculated Hedwig, who knew that the speaker had
been vigorous enough at Munich, but, since her marriage, and living at
Montmorency, she had assumed the popular air of a semi-invalid, "So you
are strong in health again?"
"Yes; but I have been very unwell," replied the lady, sinking back in
the chair as she remembered the course she had intended to adopt. "I was
very nearly at death's door," she sighed. "I really believed that I
should nevermore see any of you, my poor husband and you others. Do you
think that anything hut a severe ailment could excuse me for my strange
silence--my apparently wicked absence?"
Hedwig went on going through the form of dusting the huge metal-bound
chest, which had attracted the mistress' eyes as a new article of
furniture. Had her husband turned miser since Fortune had whirled on her
wheel at his door as soon as she quitted it? It was not Hedwig's place,
and it was not in her power to solve enigmas, so she answered nothing.
"My uncle was terribly afflicted," said the lady.
"Your uncle?"
Hedwig's incredulous tone implied that she had not believed in the
authenticity of the telegram.
"Yes; my granduncle. He was within an ace of dying, and the shock made
me so bad, after nursing him toward recovery, it was I who stood in
peril of death. My friends sent for a priest and I confessed."
The girl opened her eyes in wonder and a kind of derision, for she did
not belong to the aristocratic creed.
"Confessed?" reiterated she; "ah, yes; people confess when they are very
bad. Was it a complete confession, madame?" she saucily inquired.
"Complete as all believers should make when on the brink of the grave,"
replied Madame Clemenceau, in her gravest tone to repress the tendency
to frivolity, for she had not resented the incredulity as regarded
herself.
"I dare say," said Hedwig, who certainly had one of her lucid intervals,
"it is as when a body is traveling, one is in such a hurry that
something is forgotten. You went away so sharply that you forgot to say
good-bye to the master! if you spoke at all! Whatever did the
father-confessor say?"
"He gave me very good advice."
"Which you are following, madame?"
"When one not only has seen death smite another beside one but flit
close by oneself, I assure you, girl, it forces one to reflect. Oh, how
dreadful the nights are in the sick chamber, with a night-light dimly
burning and the sufferer moaning and tossing! Then my turn came to
occupy the patient's position, and it was frightful. Can you not see I
am much altered--horrid, in fact?"
Hedwig shook her head; without flattery, well as her mistress assumed
the air of languor, her figure had not been affected by any event since
the slaying of the Viscount Gratian, and her countenance was unmarred by
any change except a trifling pallor.
"Yes; after my uncle grew better, I was indisposed and should have died
but for the cares of an old friend, Madame Lesperon the Female Bard. But
you would not know this favorite of the Muses. You are not poetically
inclined, Hedwig!" she added, laughingly. Rising with animation, "but
that makes no matter! I am glad to see you home again. I thought of you,
Hedwig, and I have bought you something pretty to wear on your days
out--bought it in Paris, too."
"Is that so?" exclaimed the girl, much less absent and saucy in the curl
of her lip; "you are always kind."
"Yes; they are in my new trunk, for which you had better send the
gardener at once. He is not forgotten either. There is a set of jewelry,
too, in the old Teutonic style. They say now in Paris that any idea of
war between France and Prussia is absurd, and there is a revulsion in
feeling--the vogue is all for German things. I am not sorry that I know
how to dress in their style, and I have some genuine Rhenish jewelry,
which become me very well."
"I see that madame has indeed not altered," remarked Hedwig, plentifully
adorned with smiles, as the sunshine streamed into the grave apartment.
"You have fresh projects of captivating the men!" Césarine smiled also,
and nodded several times.
"Here?" cried the girl, in surprise.
"Certainly here, since I understand you are receiving company in
shoals."
"That is all over now, madame, and I am sorry, for the callers were very
generous to me. It appears that the War Ministry do not approve of
strangers running about Montmorency and into the abode of the great
inventor of ordinances--"
"Ordnance, child," corrected Madame Clemenceau.
"And the house is sealed up, as you found it, against all comers. We
have nobody here for you to try graces upon except Mademoiselle
Rebecca's papa--and he being a Jew, you must not go near him, fresh from
the confessional."
Madame Clemenceau seemed to be musing.
"I forgot--there's young M. Antonino," continued the servant.
Césarine made a contemptuous gesture, expressive of the conquest being
too easy.
"Such sallow youth are best left to platonic love, it's more proper,
and to them, quite as entertaining."
"Well, madame," said Hedwig, like a cheap Jack, holding up the last of
his stock, "they are the only men I can offer you; for, since we have
been firing off guns and cannon, our neighbors have moved away right and
left--we are so lonely. No servant would stay a week!"
"Those the only men?" said the returned fugitive; "Hedwig, this is not
polite for your master."
"Oh, madame, a husband never counts."
"You are very much mistaken. He does _count_--his money, I suppose, if
that is his cash-box." And, yielding to her girlish curiosity, she went
over to the steel-plated chest and avariciously contemplated it,
"Not at all, madame. That is where they lock up the writings and
drawings about the new gun!"
"Oh, what do they say?"
"Nothing a Christian can make head or tail of," returned the servant
reservedly. "They write now in a hand no honest folk ever used. An old
man who ought to have known better--the Jew--he taught the master, and
they call it siphon--"
"Cipher, I suppose? It appears the newspapers are right!" resumed the
lady. "He is a great man!" and she clapped her hands.
Hedwig regarded her puzzled, till her brow unwrinkling at last, she
exclaimed:
"Upon my word, I believe you have fallen in love with master."
"You might have said: I am still in love. That is why I return to his
side."
"If you tell him that is the reason," said this speaker, who used much
Teutonic frankness to her superiors, "you will astonish him more than
you did me by popping in this morning. He will not believe you."
Madame Clemenceau smiled as those women do who can warp men round to
their way of thinking.
"But he will! Besides, if it is a difficult task, so much the
better--when a deed is impossible, it tempts one."
"Well, as far as I can see, madame, that is an odd idea for you to have
had when far away from master."
"Pish! did you never hear the saying that 'Absence makes the heart grow
fonder?' Oh, girl, I had so much deep meditation as I stared at the dim
night-light," and she shuddered and looked a little pale.
"Well, madame, I should have rolled over and shut my eyes," said the
matter-of-fact maid.
There was more truth in the lady's speech than her hearer gave her
credit for. She was no exception to the rule that the wives of great
inventors almost never properly appreciate them. By the light of his
success, breaking forth like the sun, she feared that the greatest error
of her life had been made when she miscomprehended him. In her dreams as
well as her insomnia, it was Clemenceau that she beheld, and not the
gallants who had flashed across her uneven path, not even the viscount,
whose spoil was her nest-egg. Alas! it was a mere atom to the solid
ingot which her misunderstood husband's genius had ensured. She had
perhaps lost the substance in snapping at the shadow.
"Any way, I love my husband," she proceeded, moaning aloud, and resting
her chin in the hollow of her hand--the elbow on the table, to which she
had returned and where she was seated. "I am sure now."
"No doubt," said the servant, unconsciously holding the feather duster
as a soldier holds his rifle; "madame has heard about our great
discoveries in artillery? They are revo--revolutionizing--oof! What a
mouthful--the military world!"
"Yes; I read the newspaper accounts during my convalescence," replied
Madame Clemenceau.
"Then you fell in love with your husband because of his cannon," said
Hedwig, laughing. "I do not see what connection there is between them,
and, in fact," reflecting a little and suddenly laughing more loudly, "I
hear that cannons produce breaches rather than re-union. Well, after
all, if cannons do not further love, its a friend to glory and riches!
The Emperor, some of our visitors said, is very fond of artillery, and
he will give master immense contracts from the report of the examining
committee being so favorable."
"Really, Hedwig, you are becoming quite learned from the association
with scientists. What long words you use!
"That's nothing," said the servant, complacently.
"There is no word difficult in French to a German. but I can tell you
that, as we cannot live on air, and these promises do not bear present
fruit, master has been forced to sell this house."
"Eh! why is that? I like the place well enough."
"You were not here to be consulted, madame, and, we wanted the money.
Master does not wish to be obliged to M. Daniels and, besides, he, too,
does not get in the cash for his company any too rapidly. Master ran
into debt while making his guns and cannon, and we have been pinched for
ready money."
"I am glad to hear it!" ejaculated Césarine, without spitefulness, and
with more sincerity than she had spoken previously.
The girl stared without understanding.
"I have money--cash--to help him, and it will be far more proper for
him to be obliged to his wife than to strangers. Besides, I should not
tax him with usurious interest," she said maliciously.
"Money, madame," said the servant with her widely opened eyes still more
distending.
"I have two hundred thousand francs, that is, nearly as many marks,
coming from my good uncle who is a little late in doing me a
kindness--but my attention touched him. But do I not hear
steps--somebody at last moving in the house?"
"Very likely," replied the servant tranquilly, "but nobody will come in
here, before master has breakfast. Since he stores his secrets in that
chest, and no company drops in, this is a hermitage. Mademoiselle
Rebecca is not one of the prying sort."
Madame Clemenceau, who had risen with more nervous anxiety than she
cared to display to the servants, stood by her chair, looking toward the
door.
"Has he talked about me, sometimes?"
"Master? never--not before me, anyway, madame."
"Yet you gave him the telegram that explained all?"
"Yes, madame; but not until some time after your departure and when
master had returned from a promenade alone. I know he was alone, because
M. Antonino was racing about to show him some of his wonderful
experiments."
Beyond a doubt, it was Clemenceau who had stood witness to the tragedy
in the meadow. Hence his inattention to the Russian's despatch, which he
naturally would disbelieve, and probably to her prolonged absence.
It was humiliating that he had not searched for her.
"What! no allusion to my stay--no hint of my possible return?"
"His silence has been perfect as the grave. Next morning after you left
and did not return, master looked at the cover which I had from habit
placed for you, and remarked: 'Oh, by the way, you will have another to
lay to-morrow, as we shall have two guests for, I hope, a long time.' He
meant the Danielses, madame. Their coming made it a little livelier for
him and M. Antonino."
"It looks like a plot," murmured Césarine, indignantly, as she pictured
the happy reunions out of which she had been displaced in memory--not
even her untouched plate left as memento! her chair taken by Rebecca
Daniels!
"Mr. Daniels is like M. Antonino, too!" continued Hedwig. "Not only is
he getting up the company for the master's inventions, but for the young
gentleman's--he has made such a marvel of a rifle--they put a tin box
into it, and lo! you can fire three hundred shots as quick as a wink! I
walk in terror since I heard of it! and I touch things as if they would
go off and make mince-meat of me in the desert to it."
"Never mind that!" cried Madame Clemenceau, testily.
"Although the connection between piping at music halls and enchanting
the bulls and bears of the Bourse is not clear to me, I can understand
how M. Daniels, as a financial agent, should be lodging under our roof,
but his daughter--"
"She is our housekeeper, and, to tell the plain truth, madame, we have
lived nicely, although money was scarce, since she ruled the roost. Ah,
these Jews are clever managers!"
Césarine did not like the earnest tone of praise and hastened to say
bluntly:
"I suppose, then, she threw the spell over him again which once before,
at Munich, caused him, a tame bookworm, to fight for her like a
king-maker?"
"Mademoiselle Rebecca! she act the fascinatress!" exclaimed Hedwig, with
a burst of indignation.
"What is there extraordinary, pray, in a husband, apparently deserted by
his wife, paying attention to another handsome young woman?"
"Why, madame, you must forget that master is the most honorable
gentleman as ever was, and that Mademoiselle Rebecca is a perfect lady!"
Then, perceiving that her enthusiasm on the latter head was not welcome
to the hearer, Hedwig, added: "but it does not matter. We are receiving
no more company, lest the great secret leak out, and so we don't need a
lady at the table. She is going away with her father, who is to open the
Rifle Company's offices in Paris, and that's all!"
"It is quite enough!" remarked the other, frowning.
"What is the last word about him?" inquired the servant, "the
viscount-baron, I mean."
"M. de Terremonde?"
"Yes; you haven't said a word about him."
"Do you not know?" began Césarine, shuddering as the scene in the
twilight arose before her on the background of the sombre side of the
room.
"He was not likely to return hereabouts. Master might have tried the new
rifle upon him," with a suppressed laugh.
"Well, if you do not know, I need only say that I am perfectly ignorant
of his whereabouts. I went to town without his escort, and I suppose--if
he has disappeared," she concluded with emphasis, "that he has gone on a
journey of pleasure, or is dead."
"Dead," uttered Hedwig, shuddering in her turn, "in what a singular
tone you say that word."
"What concern is it of mine?" questioned Madame Clemenceau, pursing up
her lips to conceal a little fluttering from the dread she felt at the
effectual way in which her lover had been removed from mortal knowledge.
"I do not mind declaring that, if I am given any choice in the matter, I
should prefer his taking the latter course."
Hedwig's teeth chattered so that the other looked hard at her till she
faltered the explanation:
"Your way of saying things, madame, gives me cold shivers up and down
the back--ugh! Why, that gentleman was over head and ears in love with
you!"
"That is why he probably went under so quickly, and could not keep his
head above water!"
"I thought you liked him a goodish bit--"
"I--oh!"
An explosion, very sharp and peculiarly splitting the air, resounded
under the windows and caused Césarine to clap her hands to her ears in
terror.