In the Tessier drawing-room, where the carpet was threadbare with the
traffic of the feet of Princes and plenipotentiaries, and the brocade
furniture was soiled with the contact of muddy breeches, and ragged
with the rowels of spurs; where the bronze, bat-winged figure
presided over the ancient clock of ormolu and malachite that had
marked the passing of so many hours in this the death-struggle of
bleeding France, Jean Jacques Potier stood up to give an account of
himself, while just without the doorway waited a brace of muscular
Chancery attendants, and the gigantic East Prussian coachman,
Niederstedt, patrolled the terrace outside.
"You have not forgotten him! He used you somewhat roughly at the
Foreign Office in the Wilhelm Strasse. Nor, as it happens, has he
forgotten you. Come!--what have you admitted to that Witch of Endor,
_la veuve Bayard_? You are no friend to her daughter if you have
told the woman that Mademoiselle is here, under this roof."
"So you--know?..."
P. C. Breagh had gasped the words out before he could stop himself.
The Minister's flashing blue eyes lightened in laughter as they met
the appalled stare of the young man with the cropped head and the
green baize apron. He said, lisping a little as was his wont:
"I know, and I have known almost from the beginning. Everything must
be known in this house. Did you suppose I had left my Prussian
Secret Service at home in Berlin? Here! This belongs to you!"
He was standing on the hearth, his great back to the wood fire that
blazed on the steel dogs. One of a brace of letters that he pulled
from his breeches pocket, and tossed to the culprit under
examination, fell at that wretch's feet.
"Pick it up, Mr. Patrick Carolan Breagh," he said. "You will find it
a more-than-ordinarily interesting epistle. It was brought me
something over an hour ago. Your legal friend, Mr. Chown, of
Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London, advises you to go back there without
procrastination. Your absconding trustee, Mr. William Mustey,
Junior, has been found in Bloomsbury lodgings, the War having
apparently frightened him out of France. Odd, because the scent of
battlefields proves attractive to birds and animals of the predatory
order. Mustey is dead, but luckily for you he has left nearly all of
your property behind him. Some £500 of your inheritance of £7,000
seems to be missing. I daresay you will be willing to let the
deficit go. What are you saying?"
His victim, with lips screwed into the shape of a whistle, had
murmured:
"The Post Office.... Gee-whillikins!... they've given me away!..."
"Given you away!... You are a pretty conspirator!" The masterful
eyes flickered with humor. There was amusement, suppressed, but
evident, in the lines about the grim mouth hidden by the martial
mustache. "Where should my blue Prussian bees gather intelligence,
if not at the Post Office? Did you not _give yourself away_, as you
term it, when you employed the time not occupied in smearing silver
plate with whitening, and bedaubing polished boards most execrably
with beeswax,--in acting as a voluntary assistant dresser at the
auxiliary Military Hospital that has been established under the Red
Cross at the Convent of the Sisters of the Poor? When a young
Swiss--who is supposed to be ignorant of any language save his own
extraordinary gibberish--betrays a more than superficial knowledge of
French and German surgical terminology, and evinces a degree of skill
in bandaging and so forth, such as you have permitted yourself to
display, the German authorities, while they avail themselves of the
young gentleman's service, are to be pardoned for supposing him to be
other than he appears! Come, it is time this farce of yours and
Mademoiselle's ended. I am going to ring the bell, and send for her,
and tell her so now!..." The imperious hand went out to the
bell-rope of faded red, and he stayed his summons to add: "Then you
and she must pack up and betake yourselves to England.... I will
furnish you with a permit to travel by railway and a
_laissez-passer_. You will return to me a certain half-sheet of
Chancellery notepaper which I gave you in the Wilhelm Strasse last
July! Further--I have no advice to give you except that you would be
wise not to select the theatrical profession for your next venture.
You have not a gift for the stage, unlike Mademoiselle.... As for
her, the vixen! you would do well to marry her promptly. Nothing
else will cure a young man of the stupidity of being in love!"
There was something horrible in the mere fact of being taken so
lightly, when one had waited in tense agony for the ominous flurry in
the daytime--expecting in sleepless anguish the cry in the night....
The relief that mingled with the horror caused the muscles of the
mouth to relax in a smile of imbecility, made one stutter and gulp
because of the choking in one's throat....
The life of this man, who was meant when the great ones of the earth
now referred to Germany, had been in hourly peril for months past.
Now it was safe. She had not bent one's will, ineffectually, to the
effort of restraining another's. One had not kept watch and put in
one's word for nothing, remembering the debt one owed to that
powerful ruthless hand. Not unheard had one prayed in an anguish of
supplication that the woman loved beyond all Ideals, however heroic
and overwhelming, might be saved from the fate of occupying a
red-stained niche in History.
"Marry her promptly!"
He repeated the words, with the flicker of a laugh playing in his
eyes and about his heavy facial muscles. His tortured victim,
blood-red to his cropped scalp, groaned out:
"She is married already, Sir!"
"_Quatsch!_" said the Minister, laughing: "Married she is not. Oh,
she has been married as the American canvasback ducks are roasted.
She has been carried on a dish through the kitchen of matrimony, and
taken out at the opposite door."
"But--my God, sir!--I have seen her husband!" cried the young man
desperately.
"When did you see him?" asked the resonant, compelling accents. The
answer came, bringing down his frown.
"I--cannot tell you!"
Came, curiously lisped, the words:
"I fear I must compel you. All this may lead to something more
serious than I have thought...."
P. C. Breagh snarled, knitting the broad red eyebrows so
industriously sooted:
"Twice.... There can be no harm in my saying so."
"And how recently?" The grating voice scooped into one's brain like
a dentist's burred scraper. P. C. Breagh shook his head, saying:
"I can't tell you that!"
"Why not, if there is no harm in telling?" The voice was almost
pleasant. "Was it as recently as three days ago?"
No answer.
"Was it as recently as two days? ... as twenty-four hours? ... Will
you not answer for your own sake?"
The stubborn head was shaken resolutely. The Minister's voice said,
blandly, persuasively:
"You may, for all you know, be answering for hers!"
There was a stubborn silence. The Chancellor said, with his suave,
but warning lisp more perceptible than usual:
"Be good enough to touch that bell upon the table near your hand...."
P. C. Breagh obliged. Grams and Engelberg presented themselves. The
Minister said, looking at them over the head of his sacrifice:
"One of you will convey my compliments to Madame Charles Tessier, and
request her to speak to me here and now."
The stalwart, black-clad pair retired. The Minister pulled his
cigar-case from his breeches-pocket, selected a cigar, bit off the
end, and looked for a match. Meeting the burning stare of the
gray-yellow eyes under the broad sooted eyebrows, he did not fulfill
his intention of lighting, but restored the cigar to its place.
As he thrust the case back into his breeches-pocket the door opened.
Madame Charles came in, wrapped in her white shawl, and moving with
her characteristic limp and shuffle. Her glance went to the
broad-shouldered, lean-flanked figure of the young man standing at
attention a little to the left hand of the Minister. She was aware
of the huge shape of the watchful Niederstedt keeping guard outside
the terrace-windows. She heard the steady crunching of booted feet
upon the graveled stone flags of the conservatory, recalling the fact
that the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers were now
quartered there. And she said to herself, even as she made her
curtsey before the Chancellor: "The hour of discovery has come. Am I
sorry or glad?"
The heavy stare met her desperate eyes as she raised them from the
carpet. The grim voice began, and she strung her nerves to hear:
"Mademoiselle de Bayard, I have just closed an interview with your
lady-mother, who is desirous to reëstablish over your person the
maternal authority she once resigned.... That I have not betrayed to
her your presence here I think you are aware already. I had a pretty
shrewd suspicion that you were listening when I spoke to her loudly
just now upon the stairs. Am I right, Mademoiselle?"
She said, meeting his heavy, powerful stare with eyes of burning
sapphire, steadily under leveled brows of jetty black:
"It is not for me to contradict a person of Monseigneur's eminence.
Might I ask why Monseigneur is pleased to designate me as
'Mademoiselle'? Madame Charles Tessier is my name in this house."
"Mademoiselle de Bayard," he said, ignoring the interruption as a man
may when an infant has tugged him by the coat-tail, "I have to
congratulate you upon your gift of grotesque character-impersonation,
no less than your companion, whose Swiss-French _patois_, spoken with
a British accent, has never since the first instant succeeded in
deceiving me. But as one of my more amiable weaknesses is a liking
for children, I must own to having found infinite amusement in the
spectacle of Missy and Master, dressed up for grandpapa's benefit,
playing the game of 'Guess Who I Am!'..."
He was laughing now, unmistakably. He said, smoothing the heavy
mustache with a hand that twitched a little:
"But the performance ends here. So we may lay aside the cosmetics,
costumes, and properties. The hero's green baize apron, crop-wig,
and blackened eyebrows, the flour with which the heroine sprinkles
her black hair, and the stockings and towels with which she disguises
her charming shape. It will not seem surprising to you that a person
of my dubious character should be learned in the secrets of stage
disguises.... My early researches in femininity have led me into
queerer places than actresses' dressing-rooms. But where did a
Convent schoolgirl gain her knowledge of make-up?"
His mockery was intolerable. Her hate and scorn rose up in arms to
meet it. She would be silent only for an instant longer, then she
would speak and tell him all.
He was going on:
"I have here a letter, brought me some days back by the Prussian
official who is in charge at the General Post Office here in
Versailles. It is addressed to Mademoiselle Juliette de Bayard, 120,
Rue de Provence. It is dated from Mons-sur-Trouille, in Belgium, and
is written and signed by M. Charles Tessier.... I will not disguise
from you that I have mastered the contents."
He showed her the letter. Monster! he had opened it. Her blazing
eyes dwelt on him with a contempt he did not seem to feel. She had
let the white shawl drop from about her head and shoulders. Now she
straightened her slight form--(as though an artist needed the
adventitious aid of towels and stockings!)--and thrust back with a
superb gesture of both hands the heavy loops of white-streaked hair
that masked her forehead and curtained her small face, whose cheeks,
previously pale, now burned with angry fire.
He said, and as he withdrew the letter from its envelope, a small,
square enclosure wrapped in white paper, slipped from the interior
and dropped near his spurred boot:
"I have not only read this, but I am going to read it aloud to you.
For the sake of one present whose fidelity to you deserved a
confidence you seem to have withheld."
She caught one sharp breath, dropped her slender arms at her sides
and stood immovably before him. Her clenched hands, tense lips and
tragic brows, with that fierce flame of hatred and scorn burning
beneath their shadow, betrayed the test of her self-command as he
read:
"BASSELOT & TESSIER.
"WHOLESALE MERCHANTS,
"WEAVERS AND DYERS OF WOOLEN FABRICS.
"MONS-SUR-TROUILLE,
"BELGIUM.
"December 20, 1870.
"MADEMOISELLE:
"Relying on your good sense and amiability, permit me to make you a
confession.
"Torn between the urgent commands of filial duty, and the dictates of
ardent affection, I have yielded to the irresistible promptings of
Love.
"Wedded to her I adore--the name of Mademoiselle Clémence Basselôt
can hardly be strange to you--I offer you the calm devotion of a
brother. My mother is resigned to this alliance, at one time
repugnant to her maternal feelings. She desires me to say that your
luggage, taken on by her from the Hôtel de Flandre, Brussels, shall
be forwarded to you at the Rue de Provence, or any other destination
you may choose to indicate. Need I say that Madame Charles Tessier
and myself regard you as our benefactress--that you will confer upon
us the greatest obligation by consenting to remain beneath our roof.
"I would add that the capital of 80,000 francs invested by your
regretted father upon your behalf in the business of myself and M.
Basselôt can remain at the interest it at present commands (some 7
per cent. of annual profit), or be transferred to your credit at any
agents or bankers you may choose to designate.
"Receive, dear Mademoiselle, with my regrets and excuses, the
affectionate souvenirs of myself and my wife. My Clémence encloses
some wedding-cake, after the touching fashion of England. She made
it, she assures me, with her own hands.
"Respectfully and sincerely,
"CHARLES JOSEPH TESSIER."
The reader added, as he looked about him:
"Where is the wedding-cake?--that white thing! ... thank you!"
For P. C. Breagh had picked the little parcel up and restored it to
his hand. He took it, returned it to the envelope with the letter,
and said with unsmiling gravity, striking a finger on the envelope:
"In the face of this--are you married, Mademoiselle?"
She answered him dauntlessly:
"No, Monseigneur!"
"Th-then," he asked, with his portentous lisp, "wh-why on earth did
you--did you pretend to be?"
She answered with surprising quietude:
"To make my place in this house more secure."
"Ah! Might one ask why?"
He put the question with irony. She answered with astonishing
composure and dignity:
"Because at that period I desired to gain the opportunity to--kill
you, Monseigneur!"
A sound came from Breagh's throat like a curse or a groan or a sob,
or all together. Her clear gaze was troubled for a moment, she
caught her breath in a fluttering sigh.
"To kill me?..." said the resonant voice of the great figure that
upreared its bulk before the dancing hearth-blaze that threw broad
lights and shadows upon the ceiling and walls of the darkly-papered
drawing-room. It was a bitter, wintry day of sickly white sunshine,
and smileless skies of leaden grayness. Freezing sleet-drops rattled
on the terrace-windows, outside which the giant ex-porter of the
Wilhelm Strasse waited, blowing from time to time upon his chilly
knuckles and beating his great arms upon his vast chest to keep them
warm, but never removing the sharp little piggish eyes under his low
red forehead from the figure of P. C. Breagh....
"To kill me!" said the Chancellor, as a springing hearth-flame threw
a giant shadow of him upon the double doors that divided the
drawing-room from the billiard-room, where the staff of clerks and
decipherers labored from early morning until far into the night.
In the silence that his voice had broken, his keen ear heard a quill
pen buck upon a page. He imagined the splash of ink upon the thick
creamy Chancellery paper, that had evoked the "Tsch!" of the dismayed
clerk, even as he queried: "Might I ask why? It would be interesting
to know."
The firelight was full upon Juliette as she answered:
"Because you have made this War;--because through it I have been
orphaned and made desolate; but chiefly because you are the merciless
enemy of France. These milliards you would wring from her veins ...
these groans torn from her heart ... these indignities to all she
holds most sacred!... Your scorn and contempt of these great
men--Chiefs of her Government--who have stooped to beg from you
consideration ... for these things, see you well--you have been
accursed in my eyes. I have said to myself a thousand times, that to
kill you would be to save my country, and not a sin unpardonable in
the eyes of Almighty God!..."
"Your theology is as defective," said the Chancellor, "as your
sentiments are patriotic...." He surveyed the small slight figure
before him rather ogreishly from under his shaggy brows. "And so,"
he said, with his wounding irony, "you thought to play the part of a
Judith to my Holofernes--a little skip o' my thumb like you.... My
good young lady, had you succeeded in murdering me, how was it your
intention to evade summary justice? For you could not have escaped
detection.... You must be aware of that!"
She said with her quiet dignity, one hand upon her slight bosom, her
clear eyes upon the angry, powerful stare that would have crushed
another woman down:
"I should not have tried to escape, Monseigneur!"
He commented sarcastically:
"Fanatics are the most dangerous of conspirators. Life has no
value--Death has no terrors for them. They believe themselves
superior to all laws, both human and Divine. And how, may one ask,
would you have done my business? To have dispatched me by poison
would have been easiest, for you have assisted our Foreign Office
cook. Yes! Possibly it would have been poison?"
She said between her close-set teeth, hissingly:
"It should, Monseigneur, but for one thing!..."
His powerful glance rested on her curiously:
"Ah, Fury!" he said, and with her wild black disheveled locks, her
eyes that darted vengeful blue fire, the gloomy brows that frowned
over them, the long upper lip pinched down over the little
closely-set white teeth, hers was not unlike the mask of a Medusa,
wrought in onyx by the hand of some Greek master dead a thousand
years ago.
"Ah, Fury!--and what was that one thing? To what fortunate breakage
of pots in the kitchen will the Prussian King owe it that he has
still a Chancellor, when he is crowned Emperor of Germany in the
Palace of Versailles at the beginning of the New Year?"
Here was news. So the recalcitrant States had at last been ringed
in. So the sensitive objections of His Majesty the King of Bavaria
had been by some means overcome.... P. C. Breagh drew a sharp breath
at the hearing. The speaker flashed upon him a cynical look.
"There," he said, "is a tit-bit for some enterprising Editor, were it
possible to get a wire through to Fleet Street. You see what comes,
Mr. Breagh, of being false to one's principles. A few months ago you
said to me--I have an excellent memory for such utterances: '_It
would be better to cadge in the dustbins for a living than make money
out of information gained by trickery._' Yet you have not scrupled
to live in this house disguised as a common servant. Really, to one
who is aware of your ambitions, the whole thing has--a kind of stink!"
The prodded victim uttered an incoherent exclamation. Juliette cried
indignantly:
"It is not true! How can you wrong him so? If you do not know what
you owe to him, I will tell you. It is he who has saved your life!"
She flamed out all at once into a rage and cried, seeming to tower to
twice her stature:
"Because you have robbed me of my father, and because you are the
great enemy of France I would have killed you. I tried to hide this
from him, and he found it out. He stayed here--at what risk you
know!--for my sake and for your sake.... How often has he not said
to me: 'You shall not do it. He once saved me!... You shall not do
it because he has a daughter, by whom he is beloved, perhaps, as your
father was by you!... You tell me that her portrait stands by his
bedside. Go and look at it, and you will never be able to do this
hideous thing!' And I went and looked at her portrait, and it was as
he had told me.... That night I threw away the poison and swore an
oath upon the Crucifix, that, come what might, I would never seek
your life!..."
"Halt, there!" he bade her, in his rough, masterful manner. "Touch
that bell upon the table near you!" he said to Breagh. As Breagh
obeyed and von Keudell entered by the door leading from the hall,
shutting it upon a glimpse of the stalwart Grams and the athletic
Engelberg, "Fetch me that bottle," he said, "that was picked up by
the sentry in the adjoining garden. I gave it to you to lock away
for me."
Von Keudell vanished. In the interval that elapsed before his
reëntrance the Minister turned his back upon Mademoiselle and her
comrade, rested a hand upon the mantelshelf, and said, as he kicked
back a burning billet that had tumbled out of the heart of the red
fire:
"All that about my daughter's portrait is _quatsch_!" He suddenly
wheeled upon Mademoiselle, thundering: "You were frightened. That is
why you seized an opportunity to pitch away your witches' sauce....
Confess! Be candid! Have I not read you? Were not your fine heroic
frenzies all assumed to impress--him?" He indicated P. C. Breagh by
an overhand thumb-gesture. "Was it not for this spoony fellow's
benefit you wrote yourself letters from an imaginary
_Franc-tireur_--full of bombastic vaporings and bloodthirsty
denunciations borrowed from the columns of Parisian rags?"
"Monseigneur!..."
She was taken aback. She faltered, flushed, whitened, conscious of
the reproachful stare of Breagh's honest gray eyes.
"Did I not tell you?--everything is known to me!... Not only have I
read those letters you hid in the mouth of that grinning Pan in the
garden--but here is the bottle you threw away!..."
He took it from von Keudell and showed it her--a squat, wide-mouthed
chemist's ounce vial, half full of whitish powder, and read from the
label:
"ARSENIC: (_Poison._)
"_The powder as prescribed, to be diluted with Three Parts of Milk,
and applied as directed, for clearing the complexion and freshening
the skin._"
Crash!...
A turn of his wrist, and the corked-up vial flew into the fireplace,
smashing on the chimney-bricks and raising showers of crimson sparks
from the billets blazing there. A rich incense of scorching wool
arose from the Brussels carpet. P. C. Breagh stamped out one red-hot
cinder, Von Keudell darted in pursuit of a remoter danger. The
Minister himself was fain to extinguish another by vigorous stamps of
his heavy spurred riding-boots.
"Take warning," he said to Juliette, a little breathed by his
exertions, and wiping his high-domed forehead and florid cheeks with
a large white handkerchief, carried, in military fashion, in the cuff
of his coat. "In this way dangerous, high-flown emotions should be
repressed in young girls, by sensible parents. In what a false and
perilous position have your hysterical notions placed you...."
He coughed and hawked, and wiped his mouth with the big white
handkerchief, put it away and said, as though trying to lash himself
into a rage:
"Foolish child! Silly girl!... Little coquette!--pretending to be
married to torture a sweetheart; vaporing of murder--acting the
heroine--to take a gaby's breath away!... What you want is a decent,
sensible mother to administer a good whipping...."
A shudder convulsed her slight body. In the firelight her face
looked rigid and drawn.
He might have pursued, had not the gaby to whom he had
unceremoniously referred stopped him by crying:
"Be silent! I will not stand by and listen to such language! I will
not permit you to speak to her so!"
"_So!_" He surveyed the crop-headed, red-faced young man in the
green baize apron, with grim incredulity. "You will not permit me to
speak! You will silence me?... How?"
P. C. Breagh said desperately:
"I do not know how--but I will somehow silence you!... Perhaps by
reminding you that Mademoiselle de Bayard is helpless and
unprotected. That she has no stronger champion and no better
advocate than a gaby like myself."
"Retire to your room, then!" he said to her grimly. "Henceforth you
do not meddle in the kitchen, Mademoiselle. You cook capitally, your
_beignets_ are worth a bellyache, but just at this moment I am
indispensable to Germany.... Observe! You will remain entirely in
your room upstairs, until I decide what is to be done with you!" He
added, less roughly: "Madame Potier will attend on you and bring you
your meals. And--in compliment to your unflinching candor--I will
ask you to give me your _parole_ not to attempt to escape!..."
She put up both hands to her eyes, and they were trembling. When she
took them away there were tears upon her face.
"Monseigneur, I thank you. I give my _parole_ not to run away."
"So be it!" he said, and slightly acknowledging her deep curtsey,
motioned to Von Keudell to open the door.