“I promise it, your Majesty, on my word of honour as a gentleman, a
soldier, and a Frenchman.”
“You are probably in need of present funds,” the King then said; “and if
so, our Secretary shall make you out an order on the Treasury for five
hundred thalers.”
“Believing myself to be beggared of all I once possessed, I gratefully
accept your Majesty's bounty,” replied Monsieur Maurice.
The King then held out his hand for Monsieur Maurice to kiss, which he did
on bended knee, and so went out from the royal presence, a free man.
Half an hour later, he and I were strolling hand in hand under the trees.
His step was slow, and the hand that held mine had grown sadly thin and
transparent.
“Let us sit here awhile, and rest,” he said, as we came to the bench by the
fountain.
I reminded him that we had sat and rested in the same spot the very last
time we walked together.
“Ay,” he replied, with a sigh. “I was stronger then.”
“You will get strong again, now that you are free,” I said.
“Perhaps--if liberty, like most earthly blessings, has not come too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“For enjoyment--for use--for everything. My friends believe me dead; my
place in the life of the world is filled up; my very name is by this time
forgotten. I am as one shipwrecked on the great ocean, and cast upon a
foreign shore.”
“Are you--are you going away soon?” I said, almost in a whisper.
“Yes,” he said, “I go to-morrow.”
“And you will--never--come back again?” I faltered.
“Heaven forbid!” he said quickly. Then, remembering how that answer would
grieve me, he added; “but I will never forget thee, petite. Never, while I
live.”
“But--but if I never see you any more”....
Monsieur Maurice drew my head to his shoulder, and kissed my wet eyes.
“Tush! that cannot, shall not be,” he said, caressingly. “Some day,
perhaps, I may win back that old home by the sea of which I have so often
told thee, little one; and then thou shalt come and visit me.”
“Shall I?” I said, wistfully. “Shall I indeed?”
And he said--“Ay, indeed.”
But I felt, somehow, that it would never come to pass.
After this, we got up and walked on again, very silently; he thinking of
the new life before him; I, of the sorrow of parting. By-and-by, a sudden
recollection flashed upon me.
“But, Monsieur Maurice,” I exclaimed, “who was the brown man that stood
behind your chair last night, and what has become of him?”
Monsieur Maurice turned his face away.
“My dear little Gretchen,” he said, hastily, “there was no brown man. He
existed in your imagination only.”
“But I saw him!”
“You fancied you saw him. The room was dark. You were half asleep in the
easy chair--half asleep, and half dreaming.”
“But Hartmann saw him!”
“A wicked man fears his own shadow,” said Monsieur Maurice, gravely.
“Hartmann saw nothing but the reflection of his crime upon the mirror of
his conscience.”
I was silenced, but not convinced. Some minutes later, having thought it
over, I returned to the charge.
“But, Monsieur Maurice,” I said, “it is not the first time he has been
here.”
“Who? The King?”
“No--the brown man.”
Monsieur Maurice frowned.
“Nay, nay,” he said, impatiently, “prithee, no more of the brown man. 'Tis
a folly, and I dislike it.”
“But he was here in the park the night you tried to run away,” I said,
persistently. “He saved your life by knocking up the musket that was
pointed at your head!”
Pale as he always was, Monsieur Maurice turned paler still at these words
of mine. His very lips whitened.
“What is that you say?” he asked, stopping short and laying his hand upon
my shoulder.
And then I repeated, word for word, all that I had heard the soldiers
saying that night under the corridor window. When I had done, he took off
his hat and stood for a moment as if in prayer, silent and bare-headed.
“If it be so,” he said presently, “if such fidelity can indeed survive the
grave--then not once, but thrice.... Who knows? Who can tell?”
He was speaking to himself. I heard the words, and I remembered them; but I
did not understand them till long after.
The King left Brühl that same afternoon _en route_ for
Ehrenbreitstein, and Monsieur Maurice went away the next morning in a
post-chaise and pair, bound for Paris. He gave me, for a farewell gift, his
precious microscope and all his boxes of slides, and he parted from me with
many kisses; but there was a smile on his face as he got into the carriage,
and something of triumph in the very wave of his hand as he drove away.
Alas! how could it be otherwise? A prisoner freed, an exile returning to
his country, how should he not be glad to go, even though one little heart
should be left to ache or break in the land of the stranger?
I never saw him again; never--never--never. He wrote now and then to my
father, but only for a time; perhaps as many as six letters during three or
four years--and then we heard from him no more. To these letters he gave us
no opportunity of replying, for they contained no address; and although we
had reason to believe that he was a man of family and title, he never
signed himself by any other name than that by which we had known him.
We did hear, however, (I forget now through what channel) of the sudden
disgrace and banishment of His Majesty's Minister of War, the Baron von
Bulow. Respecting the causes of his fall there were many vague and
contradictory rumours. He had starved to death a prisoner of war and forced
his widow into a marriage with himself. He had sold State secrets to the
French. He had been over to Elba in disguise, and had there held
treasonable intercourse with the exiled Emperor, before his return to
France in 1815. He had attempted to murder, or caused to be murdered, the
witnesses of his treachery. He had forged the King's signature. He had
tampered with the King's servants. He had been guilty, in short, of every
crime, social and political, that could be laid to the charge of a fallen
favourite.
Knowing what we knew, it was not difficult to disentangle a thread of truth
here and there, or to detect under the most extravagant of these fictions,
a substratum of fact. Among other significant circumstances, my father,
chancing one day to see a portrait of the late minister in a shop-window at
Cologne, discovered that his former visitor, the Count von Rettel, and the
Baron von Bulow were one and the same person. He then understood why the
King had questioned him so minutely with regard to this man's appearance,
and shuddered to think how deadly that enmity must have been which could
bring him in person upon so infamous an errand.
And here all ended. The guilty and the innocent vanished alike from the
scene, and we at least, in our remote home on the Rhenish border, heard of
them no more.
Monsieur Maurice never knew that I had been in any way instrumental in
bringing his case before the King. He took his freedom as the fulfillment
of a right, and dreamed not that his little Gretchen had pleaded for him.
But that he should know it, mattered not at all. He had his liberty, and
was not that enough?
Enough for me, for I loved him. Ay, child as I was, I loved him; loved him
deeply and passionately--to my cost--to my loss--to my sorrow. An old, old
wound; but I shall carry the scar to my grave!
And the brown man?
Hush! a strange feeling of awe and wonder creeps upon me to this day, when
I remember those bright eyes glowing through the dusk, and the swift hand
that seized the poisoned draught and dashed it on the ground. What of that
faithful Ali, who went forward to meet the danger alone, and was snatched
away to die horribly in the jungle? I can but repeat his master's words. I
can but ask myself “Does such fidelity indeed survive the grave? Who knows?
Who can tell?”