The closed shutters of the Tessier house in the Rue de Provence gave
that pleasant, airy, well-kept residence standing behind its high
garden walls of stone-faced brick, festooned with autumn-tinted
creepers, an unoccupied and cheerless air.
Repeated rings at the bell of the white-painted gate of wrought iron
upon the right of the heavy _porte cochère_ topped by the lozenged
archway, elicited a caretaker in the person of the wife of the
gardener-coachman, who cried out joyfully upon recognizing one of the
ringers, and broke into a spate of words:
"Mademoiselle! ... Madame Charles! A thousand pardons for the error!
But a return so unexpected. Nothing is ready...." She queried, her
eyes becoming circular as they drank in the fact that the
newly-married wife of her master had arrived in company of a strange
young gentleman in a shabby brown suit of foreign make, and a straw
hat decidedly the worse for wear: "Madame Tessier has not accompanied
you?... Or Monsieur Charles?... Nothing has happened?" Upon being
assured that her employers were well, and still in Belgium, she
raised her eyes piously, and heaved a sigh of relief. "In these days
such terrible things happen!" sighed the gardener-coachman's wife.
"No one knows who the Prussians will not kill next!... Though, what
with the soldiers that have gone away--regiments and regiments
marching with their bands!--and the guns--thousands of guns rolling
and rolling!--one would say that France possessed enough men.... But
who knows! One can feel the fears of the people like a dark cloud
blackening the sky.... They say that at Meudon the trees have been
cut down and trenches dug, and beautiful villas blown up with
gunpowder that the Germans may not live in them when they come. Of
what use, then, the great cannon that break the windows when they
fire them from the Forts of Issy and Meudon, Vanvres and Mont
Valérien, if they cannot keep such people back?"
She had looked at the young man who accompanied Madame Charles as she
put her question. He answered, with appreciation of the shrewdness
prompting the question:
"One wishes one could answer that! But it is all true about the
trenches and so on.... All the main roads leading north and west and
east from Paris have been cut up in the same way. And the bridges
have been mined--but they will not blow them up yet. They will wait
until the Prussians come!"
"_Grand Dieu_! And all our hospitals here are full of wounded
soldiers. They arrive in trains or wagons every hour.... People
wait at the railway stations and at the barriers in crowds to see
them. Sometimes one cries out: '_My brother!_' or '_My
husband!_'--or '_My son!_'..."
The wide mouth of the little woman widened in a grimace of misery.
She gulped and sniffed, and the tears began to tumble from her beady
black eyes. "My brother Michel has been killed!... My sister has
received an official letter that says so. Also my husband's nephew,
Jean Jacques--the dear youth who served Madame Tessier so
faithfully.... Madame Charles must remember him going about the
house in his striped jacket, cleaning the silver and sweeping and
polishing the parquet.... And now my poor Potier, whom Madame
Charles cannot have forgotten.... At fifty years of age, he has been
called to serve again!"
Her poor Potier was even then marching with MacMahon's hundred
thousand toward Montmedy by Mézières, and the end that was to meet
him there, as the little woman dried her eyes with her blue apron,
and bestirred herself to welcome one whom she firmly believed to be
her young master's wife.
"No luggage! Madame has returned without luggage!" she commented
mentally, as the driver of the hack vehicle that had brought Madame
and her companion from the station was paid and jingled away.
Then as she shut the outer gate and locked it she realized that the
companion of Madame Charles was a foreigner. She could hear the pair
conversing in an unknown jargon as they stood together near the
terrace steps. Upon which the perplexity of honest Madame Potier was
banished by an effort of simple reasoning. The strange young man
would be a Belgian--an employee of M. Charles. M. Charles had
determined, all the world knew, to engage a resident bookkeeper.
This must be the Belgian bookkeeper who had accompanied Madame. For
his manner was humble to dejectedness, as became a dependent, and he
looked at Madame with extreme wistfulness. He was actually saying:
"This means good-bye, I suppose, doesn't it?..."
Juliette returned, with her heart wavering in her like a wind-blown
taper flame:
"If you desire it, Monsieur, of course it is good-bye!"
He perused the gravel walk with an appearance of great interest.
It was extraordinary that neither he nor Madame had brought any
luggage.... Madame Potier fairly writhed with curiosity to learn the
reason why. She could restrain herself no longer. She cried, madly
clashing the gate keys:
"But the luggage, Madame! ... The carriage has driven away without
depositing it. What of the trunks, imperials, portmanteaux, bonnet
boxes that Madame possessed when she went away?..."
She was a little, voluble, excitable Frenchwoman, with shiny black
hair, bright, snapping black eyes, and a hectic spot in the center of
each cheek. As yet her environment had not brought home to her what
War meant in reality. When she had wept for her brother and her
nephew by marriage, and at parting with her husband, she had relapsed
into her accustomed round of duties, not unpleasantly varied by her
newer responsibilities as guardian of her mistress's empty dwelling.
Like many other excellent women of her type, she could not read or
write, and relied on local news imparted by her gossips and bits of
intelligence left by the baker with his bread rolls, or served by the
woman who brought the morning's milk.
Now Madame Charles turned to her and told her:
"The boxes and imperials are left behind in Belgium, dear Madame
Potier. As for the articles I brought with me, they have been torn
to pieces by the lancers of M. de Bismarck. Also the luggage of this
gentleman, who has, like myself, nothing left but the clothes that he
is wearing. Thank him, for had he not protected me, I should never
have reached this house!"
"Great Heaven!" Little Madame Potier threw her hands and eyes
heavenward. "What wretches! What terrible dangers Madame has
surmounted!... What horrors one hears of!--what miseries and
sufferings!... Death is everywhere.... One would say it was the end
of the world! But still there is hope, is not there, Madame?... Our
glorious Army..."
Juliette turned a snow-white face upon the eager woman, and lifted a
little, tragic hand. She said, and in that tone and with that look
most feared and dreaded by the man who loved her:
"Our glorious Army has been betrayed and massacred! With these eyes
I who speak to you have seen vast tracts of country covered with the
slain!"
Madame Potier winced and drew herself together. Her black eyes
glared. The red spots sank out of her sharp face. And Juliette went
on:
"I traversed one of these huge fields of carnage. Many Germans were
there--but most of the dead were our French soldiers.... And in the
silence you heard their blood running, and the earth lapping it like
a great thirsty dog!..."
In the throat of the other woman, listening, an hysterical knot began
growing. You could see it working as her dry lips twitched. She
held her breath as though to keep back a scream.
"I sought among all these dead men for my father," said Juliette.
"And I found him!... His dead hand beckoned me from a mountain of
corpses.... I would have known it without the ring that he always
wore.... And I went to him and sat beside him, and asked God to let
me die also.... And a sword seemed to cut my soul from my body....
I grew cold--and all was blackness about me!... I felt no more ... I
breathed no more ... I thought: '_This must be death!_' Then a voice
spoke to me.... I was too far away to answer. It called me
loudly--and I came to life again.... I rose up.... I saw the face
of the man who had called me.... And then I knew why I must not die
just yet!"
She laughed, and so strangely that Madame Potier cried out in terror.
She would have rushed at the girl and clutched her but for Breagh's
strong interposing hand. He said in her ear in the bad French she
took for Belgian:
"Madame has traveled many miles, fasting, and she has suffered a
great bereavement.... Do not question her, but go and make ready her
apartment, and prepare food for her. Hot soup--she needs that before
all!"
The little woman addressed looked sharply at the speaker, then
mounted the two steps leading to the terrace, scuttled across it in
front of the shuttered windows of the drawing-room and billiard-room,
descended the steps upon the other side, and vanished in the
direction of the basement kitchen door.
Then P. C. Breagh, wondering at his own daring, stretched out a hand
and touched Juliette's. It was very cold. He lifted it gently and
led her unresisting down the ivy-bordered path that led into the
pleasance.
For she must not be left alone in this mood, and the garden was
still, and scented, and beautiful in the noonday sunshine. Its beds
of autumn flowers blazed from their setting of smooth and still
verdant turf. The great wistaria on the stable buildings was
magnificent in trails of fading purple blossoms. The oaks were
browning, the chestnuts shedding their yellow fans. The stately
limes were bleached pale golden, the tall acacias were already
stripped quite bare.
It was not yet the season of song for thrush and blackbird, but the
robin's sweet shrill twitter came from the heart of a hawthorn,
marvelously laden with gorgeous crimson fruit. The breast of the
bird, not yet attired in fullest winter plumage, showed orange as
japonica berries beside the ripe haws' splendid hue.
Said P. C. Breagh, trying to speak lightly and naturally:
"Look at him! What a pretty little beggar! Nobody ever told me you
had robins in France!..." Then as the bird cocked his round bright
eye and hopped to a higher twig, and Juliette's pale face remained
unchanged, and her fixed stare blankly ignored him, her sorrowful
friend cried out in a passion of entreaty:
"Juliette! Juliette, take care! For the love of God, don't yield to
this! Oh, Juliette! have pity upon others, even if you have none on
yourself!"
The cry touched a chord that responded in vibration. The stiff waxen
mask softened, and became the face he knew. She looked at him, and
her eyes were no longer fixed and glassy. She asked in wonder:
"What do you want me to do?"
Trees hid them from the house with its closed slatted shutters. They
were near a rustic seat that was under the great tulip tree. Breagh
led her to the seat, made her sit down, and sat himself beside her.
He made no effort to retain the little hand. "_It is not mine,_" he
said to himself, as he looked at it, and then his heart jolted, and
stood still.... Where was her wedding ring?... Didn't French
married ladies wear the plain gold circlet? Of course they did!
Then why?... Came her faint, sad voice again:
"What is it I might do and do not do, for myself and others? Tell
me, Monsieur, for I do not like to be unkind!"
He said, trying to speak clearly and unemotionally: "It is because
you love so greatly those who are near you that I ask you to be kind
to these and to yourself. You have suffered a great loss, you brood
upon it to your injury.... You dream of revenge upon a man,
high-placed and powerful, whom you accuse of having brought about the
War."
She had taken off the black silk veil that she had worn as head
covering. A dry leaf fluttered down from the tulip tree and crowned
her splendid coils of mist-black hair. Her thin arched brows were
drawn together and frowning; from the dark caverns that Grief had
hollowed round them looked eyes that were cold and hard and brilliant
as blue diamonds. She asked in almost a whisper:
"And if I dream ... and accuse ... am I not justified?... Because he
saved your life, do you take his part?"
Breagh answered her with a sudden spurt of anger:
"I take no part. I speak for your own good. If a woman as frail and
sensitive as you are yields to the promptings of a hate so
overwhelming, a time comes when she cannot, if she would, control
them or rule herself.... When voices sound in her ears, urging her
to deeds of violence, and she cannot silence them by any prayers....
Then she goes away into a strange dim country peopled with
shadows--lovely or queer, strange or awful. And that is the country
of Madness, where live the insane.... Even those who love her as
I--as your friends and your husband love you!--can never reach her
there!"
The pleading seemed to touch her. Two great tears over-brimmed her
pure pale underlids and fell upon her shabby black gown. She said,
trembling a little:
"You are very good to have so much solicitude for me. I thank you
very humbly. It is true that I have sustained a terrible wound, and
that it rankles--is that the right word? My nature is not
gentle--not amiable!--I long to strike back when I am wounded....
When those I love are hurt..." She stopped and controlled herself
with a visible effort, then resumed: "I have it in me to be pitiless!
See you well, there is something of my mother in me!"
"Of your mother?..."
He echoed the words in dismay that was almost ludicrous.... He had
never asked whether Juliette possessed a mother or not. Now he
looked to the house, expecting one of the shuttered French windows to
open, anticipating the appearance of a middle-aged lady arrayed in
mourning crape and weepers, and Juliette followed and understood his
look. She said, with sorrowful meaning:
"Where friends of my father live. Monsieur, you do not find my
mother. She is very beautiful, but not good, not noble, as he!...
She left him many years ago, when I was an infant. See! I could not
have been higher than that!" She measured with her hand above the
turf the height of the baby of five years, with hair that had been
silky and yellow as newly hatched chickens' down. She said, her
clear, transparent face darkening with the shadow that swept across
her memory: "Before I encountered you at Gravelotte I had passed
through a terrible experience. This lady--of whom I dread to
speak!--was thrown across my path. She did not reveal to me that she
was my mother, when I quitted Brussels in her company.... She
represented herself as the wife of an officer who had been wounded.
She told me that my father was a prisoner in the hands of the
Prussians. She took me to Rethel, that I might lay my case before
the Prince Imperial, and beg him to obtain my father's release."
P. C. Breagh looked at her doubtfully, fearing--what he most feared
for her. She said, drawing a folded envelope from the bosom of her
black school dress:
"Never shall I forget how graciously Monseigneur received me. Here
is a little keepsake he gave me with his own hand.... You shall hold
it in yours, because you are my friend, and Monseigneur would permit
it.... No one else, because no one deserves it save you!"
And she exhibited with dainty pride the splinter of rusty scrap iron.
The envelope bore a small Imperial crown in gold, with the initial
"E" beneath.... It was directed in violet ink and in a handwriting
pointed and elegantly feminine, to S. A. the Prince Imperial, with
the Great Headquarters of the Imperial Army, at the Prefecture of
Metz.
"He is so brave!... He wanted to join M. de Bazaine and fight the
Prussians. He stamped ... he wept ... he suffered such chagrin when
the telegram came from the Emperor.... No! I must not tell you of
the telegram.... My Prince said: '_Mademoiselle shall hear it
because she is discreet!_'..."
She folded away her treasure in the envelope that bore the Empress's
handwriting, and hid it away again in its sweet nest close to her
innocent heart. Life and vivacity were hers again as she descanted
upon the graces and gifts of her Imperial princeling, and P. C.
Breagh listened, grateful for the change in her. The shadow came
back for a moment as she told him:
"And when I descended to the vestibule, Madame had gone away.... She
had been seized with faintness in the moment of our arrival, when she
had encountered a stranger passing through the hall.... Then I went
back to the hotel, and crept up to my room quietly. Madame--whom I
had discovered to be my mother!--was engaged with a visitor.... I do
not know at all who he was. But I heard him say, on the other side
of the door that was between us ... '_When she comes, you shall
present me to the little Queen of Diamonds!_' And he laughed....
_Mon Dieu!_ how strange a laugh!... It made me feel cold. It makes
me cold even now to remember it.... But I do not think I have been
really warm since the night upon which I found the portrait, and my
mother said: '_The discovery was inevitable! Now, with your leave, I
am going to sleep!_'"
With such truth did she render the very tone of the sumptuous
Adelaide's languid irony that P. C. Breagh started as though he had
been stung. Somewhere he had met someone ... a woman who spoke like
that?... Who was she? Where had they encountered?... He beat his
brains to evoke some reply, in vain. And Juliette went on:
"It does me good to tell you this, Monsieur, though I thought at
first I would not. You will understand how terrible it was to
discover in this lady, who had deceived me, the mother whom I have
believed dead until a few months ago. There was something in her
very beauty, and ah! she is so beautiful!--that made me regard her
with terror.... See you, I prayed to Our Blessed Lady for aid to
overcome that terror. Then at the daybreak, I rose and went to her
bed. When I saw her sleeping, I think I feared her more than ever.
The face can reveal so much, Monsieur, in sleep. And hers was a
sleep uneasy, and troubled by visions.... Without waking she said a
thing so strange.... '_Only a woman of fashion would be guilty of
such infamy!_' ... What made you start so violently, Monsieur?"
For P. C. Breagh had jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet.
His mouth screwed itself into the shape of a whistle, his eyes
rounded unbecomingly. He remembered when and where he had heard that
utterance--in the resonant accents of the Man of Iron, and addressed
to the adventurous beauty encountered at the Foreign Office in the
Wilhelm Strasse, Berlin.
What were the words that had preceded the sentence, scathing in their
irony, terrible in their implied contempt?
"_It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than
Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus
Libertina.... Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such
infamy.... Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!_"
And an English boy had picked it up, and seen the devastating change
wrought in that softly tinted mask of sensuous beauty, by Conscience,
roused to anguish by the vitriol splash of scorn.
So the Duessa of the Wilhelm Strasse was Madame de Bayard! How
strange the chance encounter that had brought them together in that
house! What was the bargain she had hoped to drive with Bismarck?
What had she intended when she had taken her daughter to Rethel? Who
was the man who had been waiting to be presented to the little Queen
of Diamonds?... And how true had been the instinct that had warned
the girl of danger, whose nature her Convent-bred innocence made it
impossible for her to conceive?
She was speaking:
"Do not think me wicked or insensible, Monsieur. I am deeply
sensible of all your goodness!... I know very well that there is
truth in what you say!... You are noble, candid, magnanimous....
You do not comprehend what it is to hate so that it is torture ...
like fire burning here, here, and here!..."
She touched her slight bosom and her throat with the joined
finger-tips of her small hands, shielded her eyes and forehead with
them an instant, then swept them wide apart. A curious gesture, and
notable, in its suggestion of surging overwhelming emotion, and the
dominance of an impulse obsessing in its evil strength.
"Here where it is so quiet I shall recover in a little.... I shall
become calmer.... I shall learn to sleep again.... You cannot
imagine how much I wish to sleep, Monsieur!... But when I lie down
it is as though great doors in my brain were thrown wide open. There
is music ... and processions of people come pouring, pouring
through.... There are voices that make great clamor--there are hands
that wave to me and beckon. But I clench my own hands and lie
still--so very still! I pray to Our Lord that one figure may not
pass among the others, for then I know I shall have to get up and
follow him.... I cry to Our Lady to cover my eyes with Her cool
hands, that I may not see if he does come. But always he passes;
walking or driven in a chariot--riding a great horse, or borne upon
the shoulders of guards. And then I resist no more, for it is
useless! I wake!--and I am standing in the middle of my room!"
Said P. C. Breagh, comprehending the situation: "In a word, you are
suffering from overstrain and consequent insomnia. And I wish I were
a full-blown M.D., because I think I should know what to do. But you
will let me prescribe the doctor, if I may not undertake the case,
won't you? What's that? Who's there?"
Something like a gurgling laugh had sounded behind them, and Juliette
glanced round, and back at Carolan with something of the old gayety
in her eyes.
"It is the Satyr of the pool, where Madame Tessier grows her water
plants. He laughs like that when the water bubbles in his throat."
She rose and followed a little path leading through a shrubbery of
lilac and syringa. Beyond rose the ivy-hung and creeper-covered
eastern boundary wall of the pleasance. From the grinning mouth of
the Satyr mask wrought in gray stone the slender spring spouted no
longer. It trickled from a hole in the pipe behind the mask, and yet
the laugh sounded at intervals as of old. The wall below the mask
was wet, and green with a slimy moss-growth, fed by the dampness; the
ferns that bordered the pool, the water plants that grew in it, had
suffered from the diminution of their supply. The brook had
diminished to a slender trickle winding among stones crowned with dry
and withering mosses. Juliette cried out at the spectacle in sheer
dismay.
What would Madame say if she knew how spoiled was this, her cherished
bit of sylvan beauty? Never mind. When she returned all should be
found in order of the best. The kitchen garden, perforce neglected
since the departure of M. Potier, should be weeded diligently. The
dead roses should be snipped off with loving care, the withered
blossoms pulled from the sheaths of the flaming gladioli.... The
place needed a mistress, that was plain to Mademoiselle de Bayard's
order-loving eye.
"We will work here!..." she said, and almost clapped her hands at the
thought of the pleasant labor waiting them. "Me, I adore gardening!
And you also--do you not, Monsieur?..."
Could P. C. Breagh deny? He cried with a hot flush of joy at the
thought of long days of sweet companionship: "Indeed I do!... and of
course I will, Madame!"
"'_Madame!..._'"
She had nearly betrayed the truth, but she nipped her stern upper lip
close down upon its rosy fellow.... Was she not married? Nearly, if
not quite....
So nearly that until M. Charles appeared with Madame, she would
maintain the character of a recent bride. It would be better not to
rekindle in the gray eyes of Monica's brother that fire that had
blazed there so fiercely a few hours before.